I find very often that professional and laymen are using the wording “risk” and “reliability” as having the same meaning. As I speak few languages, I have the impression that this perception of the subjects is cross cultural phenomena.
These "natural language" conceptual tags may be very similar in a given context, or they may be very different, depending on the natural language discussion context.
When these natural language concepts are reduced to process and mathematical formulations they become distinct, separate entities.
Take care and have fun,
Joe
Hi Joseph, thanks for your respond. I hope that you and the other colleagues understand that my question was merely trying to initiate / provoke a discussion on the topic…
I think that in our modern and very complex world, the accuracy of the professional wording is of utmost importance. Do we need two set of “seemingly similar” languages: one for laymen and one for professional use?
Daniel:
Another excellent question...
It appears to me that there are a range of languages in use in any given context at any given time.....
Each type of language has advantages and disavantages, basic language types are:
Prose
Mathematics
Structured Graphics
These language types may be used to communicate in natural languages and/or formal languages. Natural languages are not domain speciifc and are applied to all domains in a similar manner. Formal languages are designed for specific applications in specific domains using formal language types.
When formal languages (type and domain specific) are used they must be accompanied by a metalanguage that is used to talk about the formal language (object language).
David Hilbert introducted the concepts of an object language and a metalanguage. The object language is the domain specific language and the metalanguage is natural language.
A graded range of languages for any specific domain area may be very valuable.
Take care, be good to yourself and have fun,
Joe
It's again a big question to define risk in a definite & unique manner....people define risk as hazard, of a function of hazard & vulnerability or sometimes depending on damage as well....
Hence, very difficult to implement the projects with the communities...
It might be better to consider this question in the context of two different language types, natural language and formal language. Natural language is used by people to communicate about the world. Natural language evolves naturally.
Formal languages are are focused on specific domains and have specific notation and relationships defined.
Natural language is very ambiguous and needs common context and verbose content to help make the natural language statements clear. Natural languages are full of idiom and metaphor, which makes understanding more difficult.
Formal languages are unambiguous, literal and can be fully analyzed (structure, tokens, symbols) to clearly understand the semantic meaning of the expression in a formal language.
Wayne Wymore in "Model-Based Systems Engineering," 1993, proposed a formal systems design language. In this formal systems engineering language, reliability is defined as " Reliability is the performance figure of merit that assigns to each functional system design the probability the INFOSY will not enter failure mode between the time any user inputs a demand for information and the time the information is delivered."
Natural languages are needed to provide a metalanguage to talk about formal languages. Formal languages are needed to reduce ambiguity and redundancy in communications.
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