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Comment by Morendil | Hacker News Reader

Which part of the above did you have trouble with?

"Citation" is the topic being discussed. It's a technical term that refers to how scientific papers refer to other scientific papers.

"Modality" is the concept I've been introducing for three paragraphs. You're supposed to know what it means by then, or I've not been clear enough.

"Present as" is an intransitive verb phrase. I could say the same thing, perhaps more simply, by saying "you can think of a citation as a modality". Perhaps it's this phrase that has thrown you?

[EDIT: I've changed the article to try and make the sentence clearer. Thanks for your feedback.]

It seems to me that "degree of confidence" is clear enough, and that it's clear enough that a modality can have a degree of confidence associated with it.

So the article introduces two technical terms you're perhaps not familiar with, but I'd suppose someone who can read a CS paper or write a program can cope with that much.

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It's the word "modality" that throws me. The word by itself is pretty vague -- "somehow related to a mode". The linked Wikipedia article is dense and confusing. You explain it as a way of modifying a statement. Then you say a publication is an "extended modality". That requires another mental stretch. How does the abstract idea of "a publication" connect to modifying a statement? One expects you to explain that in the following sentences, but you don't really. Instead you follow with the seemingly unrelated statement, "A researcher may wish to state a conclusion: “water boils at 100 degrees celsius”. Convention dictates that he should initially add various hedges to his conclusion: ..." So when writing a publication a researcher will customarily add hedges. What does that have to do with a publication being an "extended modality"? Is it really necessary to use such an obscure term? It seems like it shouldn't be this hard to understand what you're saying.

I definitely agree about the linked Wikipedia article on modality. Literary theory is probably not a good way to talk about modality with programmers, but the idea of modality isn't just about linguistics and literature, and isn't as obscure as you think.

A better starting point for programmers and computer scientists would have been modal logic, which uses the modal operators of necessity and possibility.

For example, classical logic uses propositions. I can say "P" in classical logic. In modal logic, I can say "P", "Necessarily P", and "Possibly P", where logical necessity and possibility are modalities. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_logic -- it's a pretty good overview and it links the logical and epistemological senses of modality.

> You're supposed to know what it means by then, or I've not been clear enough.

I hate to break it to you, but people (especially on a site like HN) have a tendency to skim over text. I hate to repeat myself as much as the next guy, but when you're communicating with human beings it's quite often that you have to beat a dead horse.

The other thing is that the overall sentence isn't necessarily very difficult to read, but the fact that there are so many $10 words gives the impression that it's more difficult to read than it is. So most people (like me) don't try.

With the above noted, I don't know if there's any way it can be improved. Perhaps that's the best way to say it. But those are the reasons others might find it difficult to read.

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