Re: Four further issues
Chris, thank you for this clarification, which moves us closer to one of
the problems that concerns me: whether inheritance relations from an upper
level ontology are transitive through the interstices of axiomatized
ontologies that seem to be compliant with it on a verbal level, but where
the axiomatized ontologies are based on differing internal operators
affecting what the nature of 'is' is. Lee
Josiah Lee Auspitz
lee@textwise.com
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On Mon, 12 Jun 2000, Chris Menzel wrote:
>
> 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
>
>