Re: Four further issues
On Mon, Jun 12, 2000 at 10:25:46AM -0400, Josiah Lee Auspitz wrote:
> Chris Menzel writes:
>
> "Obviously, a process ontology in which time is explicitly discrete
> would not be interoperable with one in which it was continuous." [He goes
> on to assert that PSL is not such a system.]
That is, one which assumes neither discreteness nor continuity vis-a-vis
time.
> Leaving PSL aside, since the standard determining "obvious"
> non-interoperability is the supposed priority of the continuous-discrete
> disjunction, ...
I'm not sure I get your point here, but I stated mine badly, so let me
clarify. Let S1 be a system in which time is explicitly continuous.
Let S2 be a system in which time is explicitly discrete. *All* I meant
by their non-interoperability (and it was a serious blunder on my part
to use the term in this way) was that there will be assertions in S1
that cannot be directly translated into S2 without inconsistency, and
vice versa. S2, for example, might make an assertion about the *next*
timepoint after a given timepoint. Translated directly into S1, this
will yield an inconsistency, as it is a theorem of the theory of
continuous time that no timepoint has an immediate successor.
You picked up on the evil implications of my assertion where
"non-interoperability" is given a stronger (and more natural) reading:
> This is a thought-provoking outcome. If my memory serves me right, the
> fundamental character of the continuous-discrete disjunction was the
> consensus of several distinguished contributors to these lists (Lehmann,
> Menzel, Guarino, Sowa, Simons, Hayes, among others) at the Heidelberg
> ontology conference, and I do not recall dissent from it by any
> participants. It was one of several such disjunctions held to be
> fundamental, or at least highly useful, for an upper level ontology. Does
> it then follow that for any of these fundamentals, if an axiomatized
> ontology falls on side A of a fundamental divide, it cannot be
> *meaningfully* interoperable with one that falls on side B?
It most certainly does not follow -- or at least, we are all men and
women most miserable if it does. But it shouldn't. Obviously, most any
information not involving time should be shareable directly, as well as
information involving only properties of time that are common to both
systems, e.g., the information that A occurs before B. And even
information the does involve continuity or discreteness might well be
shareable with appropriate state setting. E.g., assertions about the
*next* timepoint in S2 could be translated into S1 by adding some notion
of clock ticks to S1. The properties of discrete time in S2 could then
be correlated with properties of clock ticks rather than time per se in
S1.
-chris
ps: While thinking about my reply I did a web search on "discrete
ordering" on alltheweb.com and was given a bunch of references to
pages on porn web sites containing assurances to potential customers of
the confidentiality of their ordering processes! :-)
--
Christopher Menzel # web: philebus.tamu.edu/~cmenzel
Philosophy, Texas A&M University # net: chris.menzel@tamu.edu
College Station, TX 77843-4237 # vox: (409) 845-8764