Re: SUO: Language discussion - Interesting, but is it ontology?
> In the work we are doing, it seems like we should be talking about:
> * The concept of "boy", not "John", or "a boy".
> * The concepts of "thief" and "theft", and not "a thief who broke into
> the Watergate"
> * The concepts of "automobile" and "engine", and not "this automobile"
> or "that engine".
>
> From your response I see, and it makes sense to me, that we can treat these
> categorical concepts as individuals, and build up a structure of
> information about them in the form of axioms. From John's response I see
> that there are some meta-level languages (or versions of languages) that
> can be used to do just that.
*And* you can (with certain limitations) axiomatize concepts via
*general* first-order statements containing predicates that are
intended to express the concepts.
> My point is that I think we would make more progress on the work of
> ontology if we primarily focused our discussion on the work of ontology.
> The opinion I'm trying to express is that I don't think true SUO (or LO, or
> MO) work should ever involve any discussion of actual individuals, with the
> possible exception of individuals used as exemplars or archetypes of
> categories. In which case we may need a type of statement that is
> explicitly states an exemplary or archetypal relationship between the
> individual and the category being explicated.
That is exactly what the "instance-of" predicate does; and what the
function/argument syntax of first-order logic does.
> In other words, logical reasoning about individuals is a perfectly valid
> thing to do - it's just not an ontological thing to do.
I don't believe anyone disagrees with this -- though I think you'll
find a bit more axiomatization of individuals in lower level
ontologies where particular individuals might play critical roles in
the structure of a given domain.
-chris