RE: RE: SUO: Re: Ballot Comment - 3D versus 4D.
>Chris,
> Since you've studied this topic extensively, shouldn't it then be
>easy to show, given the formalization below, a faulty conclusion?
>That would be very concrete and would certainly help me (as well as
>others) to understand the issues better.
....
>Adam
>
>> >
>> >(instance JoesArm OrganicObject)
>> >(instance JoesArmAtAge10 OrganicObject)
>> >(instance JoesArmAtAge20 OrganicObject)
>> >(spatioTemporalPart JoesArmAtAge10 JoesArm)
>> >(spatioTemporalPart JoesArmAtAge20 JoesArm)
>> >(equal (BeginFn JoesArmAtAge10) (BeginFn (YearFn 1990)))
>> >(equal (EndFn JoesArmAtAge10) (EndFn (YearFn 1990)))
>> >(equal (BeginFn JoesArmAtAge20) (BeginFn (YearFn 2000)))
>> >(equal (EndFn JoesArmAtAge20) (EndFn (YearFn 2000)))
>> >
No contradiction there; but all you have done here is to adopt the
perdurantists (4d) perspective. Apparently, instances of
OrganicObject are four-dimensional entities, which have temporal
parts and beginning and ending times. But an endurantist (call him or
her 'E') will object: E will say that JoesArm is the same arm at any
time, so would want to write for example:
(= JoesArm JoesArmAtAge10)
which will immediately produce an inconsistency (eg by applying EndFn
to the terms).
I might add that most of the documentation in the SUMO seems to be
written from E's perspective, so y'all had better do some rewriting
if you intend to understand all those 'physical object' quantifiers
from a perdurantist point of view. Also, you might want to reflect
that ontological pragmatists (such as Vinay Chaudhri) objected
strongly to the use of a perdurantist ontology in the HPKB project,
largely because SMEs found it 'unintuitive' and because it needed a
lot more symbols to assert temporally relative facts.
Pat
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