RE: SUO: RE: Criteria that an ontology must satisfy
Chris,
I think we are pretty much in agreement. I'm deleting
everything from the previous note except a few comments
of your that I wanted to comment on.
>CP> As I said in an earlier email, these terms come from David Lewis
>(Plurality of Worlds). If you do a Google search on either of the terms, you
>find papers that refer to Lewis.
>CP> The reason I am keen on making people note they have made a
>'metaphysical' decision for Perdurantism (or Endurantism) is to avoid the
>time-consuming problems of dealing with backsliding later. There are a lot
>of consequences of this decision that people are not always keen to accept.
>By agreeing up front that the decision has been made, it is easier to
>discuss a retreat from the position later.
OK. I will go back and reread Lewis's discussion. I have his
book, which I found very distasteful when I first read parts
of it. I didn't consider his position worth taking seriously.
And by the way, I just did a Google search of "perdurantist",
"endurantist", "perdurantism", and "endurantism". The maximum
number of hits for any of those words was 16.
Compare that with the 35,500 hits for YMMV (the acronym for
"your mileage may vary"). That does not seem very big.
I don't see any reason/value/purpose in adopting a pair
of words that hardly anybody uses except someone whose
position we find extemely objectionable.
>>CP> In fact, I would have thought they are a useful way of characterizing
>an
>
>>aspect of the Whiteheadian view and contrasting it with the opposing
>>Enduring-Continuant view.
If we want to contrast it with any particular view, I would
much rather get a clear statement from Nicola of how he would
characterize his position. There are some issues on which I
agree with Nicola, and some on which I don't. I would like
to get a very clear summary of exactly which points we agree
on and which we disagree on.
>CP> And a suitable process may be characterized by both a continuant and an
>occurrent - as it the Statue/Clay example.
Processes are fundamental. Frank Ramsey had a good way of
characterizing Whitehead's point of view: "Object terms
are adjectives applied to processes." I'll dig up the
exact passage from Ramsey's book, scan it in, and send it
to the SUO list. Ramsey was a good guy -- he read Peirce,
and he was the one that Wittgenstein credited with his
conversion from Bertrand-Russellism. (And Ramsey was also
the person that Bertrand R. asked to revise the Principia M.)
>CP> It seems to me that the word 'can' here is equivocal. It seems to me
>that if we work hard enough almost all processes could be characterized as
>either continuants or occurrents. However, some times some people will do
>one, some people will do the other and some people will do both. And, as
>people's knowledge grows (or diminishes) this will change. So being a
>continuant or occurrent (for a person X) is a relationship between how X
>knows a process (maybe Barry Smith's Epistemology) and the process. The
>reason it seems to me not to be so fundamental for integrating (or
>translating between) ontologies is that it does not make sense to use
>continuant or occurrent as a starting point for the translation (unlike
>process, for example) as persons X and Y can quite correctly (depending upon
>their knowledge) classify a thing differently.
I agree. Fundamentally, everything is a process. But for
various purposes, you can select one or another "adjective"
to apply to different features that you consider significant.
>CP> I presume, because I cannot find you saying otherwise, that you do not
>regard all processes as inherently continuant or occurrent.
I would say that nothing is inherently continuant, and
everything that exists is an occurrent (i.e. process-like).
But for different time scales, some processes move so slowly
that it is convenient to use object-talk to refer to them.
>CP> Sorry a typo- I meant 'extensionalism' not 'essentialism',
OK.
>CP> I am sure that we could find some people in the philosophical
>community - even some that did not go to Oxford - who have a different
>definition of 'obsolete'.
Yes. I make statements like that when I am in one of my more
excited moods. In a more sober mood, I would merely say that
I am appalled that philosophers allow people like Michal Dummet
to get away with churning out book after book about every last
ink drop from Frege's pen when he is so hopelessly ignorant of
the historical state of logic in the late 19th century.
John Sowa