RE: SUO: Re: Parse Of Things Remembered
Dear John,
So "giving" is a mediator?
Regards
Matthew
===============================================================
Matthew West http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/
Principal Consultant Shell Visiting Professor
Operations & Asset Management The Keyworth Institute
Shell Services International The University of Leeds
http://www.shellservices.com/ http://www.keyworth.leeds.ac.uk/
H3229, Shell Centre, London, SE1 7NA, UK.
Tel: +44 207 934 4490 Fax: 7929 Mobile: +44 7796 336538
===============================================================
> -----Original Message-----
> From: John F. Sowa [mailto:sowa@bestweb.net]
> Sent: 14 March 2001 20:18
> To: pat hayes; John F. Sowa; standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
> Subject: Re: SUO: Re: Parse Of Things Remembered
>
>
>
> Pat,
>
> As Karl Marx once said, "Je ne suis pas Marxiste." There have
> been people harping on triadic mysticism to the point where
> they turn off many people inlcuding me (and if he were alive)
> Peirce as well. Let me try again to explain the point with
> as little mysticism about threeness as possible.
>
> >I only ever say it as a response to the endless repetition of a
> >mantra about 'irreducible triadicity' by Peircian cultists.
>
> >And such relabelling IS a reduction to binary relations. Whatever
> >metaphysical significance y'all think it doesn't have, the fact
> >remains that this is a perfectly well-defined transliteration of FOL
> >into the sublanguage of FOL which uses only binary relation symbols
> >(and if that isn't a reduction to dyads, I have no idea what a dyad
> >is.)
>
> Let's drop the term "reduction to dyad" along with the term
> "irreducible triadicity" because they sound more high-falutin'
> than they deserve to be.
>
> To be as mundane and explicit as possible, let me take the
> verb "give", which Peirce, Whitehead, and you have used as
> an example, as in "John gave the book to Mary." And let
> us try to rephrase that sentence as a conjunction of other
> English sentences, which involve no more than two of the three
> entities "John", "Mary", and "the book" in any one sentence.
>
> Question: Is it possible to for any such conjunction of
> sentences to capture the full meaning of the sentence
> "John gave the book to Mary"?
>
> For example: "John dropped the book. Mary picked it up."
>
> This doesn't capture the transfer of ownership involved
> in giving.
>
> Example 2: "John renounced ownership of the book. Mary
> claimed ownership of the book."
>
> This captures the change of ownership, but not John's
> intention of having Mary rather than anyone else assume
> ownership.
>
> Example 3: "John initiated an act of giving. The giving
> had a book as object. The giving had Mary as recipient."
>
> This example does capture the three-way relationship, but
> only by creating another entity "giving", which itself has
> the open slots in its definition -- formally speaking,
> any representation of "giving" must have "frame-like" or
> "lambda-calculus-like" representation, which contains
> three inner variables or slots. Then each of the three
> sentences instantiates one of those slots.
>
> The only point that Peirce, Whitehead, and I have been trying
> to make is that there are concepts in English, such as Give,
> which cannot be defined without using a frame, a lambda
> expression, or some such formal device that contains three
> distinct slots, variables, boxes, or whatever.
>
> Those are things that I called "mediators" in my toplevel
> ontology. Furthermore, those mediators keep appearing and
> reappearing whenever there is some kind of representation,
> perception, intention, or context involved.
>
> For Whitehead's discussion of the point (which has far less
> mysticism than any of the other discussions you may have heard)
> please go to Ch. 7 of his book _Concept of Nature_:
>
> http://paradigm.soci.brocku.ca/~lward/Whitehead/White1_07.html
>
> Then use the "find" option of your browser to search for
> the word "cluster", which should take you to an excerpt
> which starts on p. 150 and continues for several more pages.
> Following is the beginning of that excerpt.
>
> John
> _______________________________________________________________
>
> The difficulties which cluster around the relation of
> situation arise from the
> obstinate refusal of philosophers to take
> seriously the ultimate fact of multiple relations. By a
> multiple relation I
> mean a relation which in any concrete instance of
> its occurrence necessarily involves more than two relata. For
> example, when
> John likes Thomas there are only two
> relata, John and Thomas. But when John gives that book to
> Thomas there are three
> relata, John, that book, and Thomas.
>
> Some schools of philosophy, under the influence of the
> Aristotelian logic and
> the Aristotelian philosophy, endeavour to
> get on without admitting any relations at all except that of
> substance and attribute.
> Namely all apparent relations are to be
> resolvable into the concurrent existence of substances with
> contrasted attributes.
> It is fairly obvious that the Leibnizian
> monadology is the necessary outcome of any such philosophy.
> If you dislike pluralism,
> there will be only one monad.
>
> Other schools of philosophy admit relations but obstinately
> refuse to contemplate
> relations with more than two relata. I
> do not think that this limitation is based on any set purpose
> or theory. It
> merely arises from the fact that more complicated
> relations are a bother to people without adequate
> mathematical training, when
> they are admitted into the reasoning.
>
> I must repeat that we have nothing to do in these
> lectures with the ultimate character of reality. It is quite
> possible that in
> the true philosophy of reality there are only
> individual substances with attributes, or that there are only
> relations with
> pairs of relata. I do not believe that such is the
> case; but I am not concerned to argue about it now. Our theme
> is Nature. So
> long as we confine ourselves to the factors
> posited in the sense-awareness of nature, it seems to me that
> there certainly
> are instances of multiple relations between
> these factors, and that the relation of situation for sense
> objects is one example
> of such multiple relations.
>