SUO: Re: SUO Comment #2
I agree with Nicola Guarino on many of his points, but there
are a couple that require some clarification and further
discussion.
John Sowa
The following point in particular needs to be clarified:
>.... According to my understanding, the distinction
>"continuant/occurrent" is not independent from the distinction
>"physical/abstract", since continuants and occurrents are both
>physical (i.e., located in space/time). Therefore, there are no
>entities that are both occurrents and abstract (scripts, for
>instance, carry information about occurrents, but they are not
>occurrents).
I agree with Nicola that all physical entities are located in time and
space, and all abstract entities correspond to what Whitehead called
"eternal objects" -- they are outside of time and space. Examples of
abstract entities include mathematical structures such as numbers and
geometrical forms as well as the content of a book or a musical score.
However, abstract entities such as procedures may have parts that are
isomorphic to physical processes. As Nicola said, procedures carry
information about processes, but they are not located in time and space.
In the KR book, I used the differentia "located in time and space" to
distinguish the categories Physical and Abstract. It would be redundant
to use that same differentia as part of the definition of Occurrent.
Therefore, I used the differentia "characterized by time-like
relationships" to distinguish the category Occurrent from the category
Continuant:
1. A continuant is an entity whose description or definition does not
require time-like relations such as before, after, or next.
2. An occurrent is an entity whose description or definition must
involve such time-like relations.
In the KR book, I gave many examples of abstract occurrents: computer
programs, musical scores, a recipe for baking a cake, differential
equations involving derivatives in terms of time, or instructions for
performing any kind of physical activity. All of these are abstract
entities, yet their descriptions or definitions must involve time-like
relations, which could be described in words such as "before" and "after",
mathematical symbols such as dx/dt, or the syntax of a musical score.
Bottom line: I believe that the primary disagreement between Nicola
and me (at least on this point) is about terminology. For me, the
distinction is much more important than the particular term that is
used. I think that the term "abstract occurrent" is a good one for
describing things like procedures, scripts, and musical scores. But
if anyone can suggest a better term, I'd be happy to consider it.
Following are some comments on Nicola's comments:
>1. Meaning of "defining".
>
>The verb "define" occurs often in this discussion, but it would be
>useful to make clear that, strictly speaking, most concepts just
>CAN'T be defined, in the sense that there is no way to come up with
>necessary and sufficient conditions for them.
I very strongly endorse this point. My example of the giant fungus
is an illustration of what Friedrich Waismann called "open texture".
For any definition that we may propose for any natural concept (i.e.,
any category that applies to things that naturally occcur in the world,
as opposed to mathematical structures or humanly specified artifacts),
it is impossible to give a precise definition that includes all and only
those instances that we would "naturally" want to include.
>2. Meaning of "upper"
>
>In my opinion, the meaning of "upper" we need for the SUO is the
>union of "meta" and "generic". That is, we need to include in the SUO
>all the meta stuff Douglas McDavid mentioned, plus a reasonable
>number of "generic" (or "general") concepts (a rough estimate of a
>couple of thousand is OK with me, as we discussed in the previous
>thread). With "generic" I mean here "common (and relevant) to
>multiple domains/applications". Of course this is a very generic
>definition of "generic"....
I agree.
>3. What kind of classes in the SUO?
>
>This observation seems to be very much related to the recent work
>Chris Welty and I have done, presented at the AAAI tutorial on
>conceptual modeling and ontological analysis. Among other things, we
>present a formal way to distinguish between properties according to
>whether or not their instances are "identifiable things" (using the
>above expression). We further discuss the notion of a "backbone
>taxonomy" that only contains properties of this kind, plus their
>generalizations. This gives a criterion for deciding the properties
>to be included in the SUO, which is pretty much in line with
>McDavid's suggestion above. Disjointness constraints between these
>properties are the result of ontological meta-properties that reflect
>their formal behavior with respect to identity, unity, essence. See
>http://www.cs.vassar.edu/faculty/welty/aaai-2000/ for further info.
This is an important issue that will require further discussion.
>4. Lattices and constraints
>
>Just a word of caution: theory of lattices is of course very
>powerful, but before exploring the combinatorial results of a set of
>basic distinctions we must first check for possible mutual
>dependencies. In many cases, basic primitives turn out to be NOT
>mutually independent, so that some of their combinations are
>naturally excluded.
I agree with this principle, but as I mentioned above, my definitions
make the distinction of physical/abstract orthogonal to the distinction
of continuant/occurrent.
>.... The point is that
>applying theory of lattices alone may lead to fascinating symmetric
>structures that don't reflect actual ontological constraints.
That is true of any application of mathematics in any branch of science.
Science begins with a collection of data, uses mathematics to organize
the data into theoretical structures, draws conclusions from those
theories, which make further predictions, which must be verified by
further observation. Arm-chair theorizing must always be tested
by experiment and observation.
John Sowa