RE: SUO: 2000-7-26 example
>>
>>MW: Precisely YOU THINK that firstness secondness and thirdness are
>>unnecessary, so that is sufficient to exclude them.
>>
>>The first issue is that you set yourself up as final arbiter, despite
>>prolonged and continued objections to the position you take.
>>
>>The second issue is that frankly, it does
>>not matter if they are "covered". The issue is that these concepts
>>need to be defined in terms of class, property and relation,
>>and vice-versa, even if they are redundant. Of course if you are sure
>>that they are redundant, I presume you already have these definitions
>>worked out somewhere, so why do you not expose them to scrutiny?
>
>Please, let's not make this a personal attack, ok? John has
>advocated these concepts and apparently you do too. If you or he
>provide a definition for them then the group can discuss them, and
>if there's consensus they will be added regardless of what I might
>think personally.
>
>As a reducto-ad-absurdum argument, if I say "Foo must be in the
>ontology, so there!" obviously that's insufficient. John's argument
>has been much stronger than that but along a continuum from there to
>a precise change proposal it's closer to the former. We've had
>people such as Pat Hayes, who as you know I often disagree with,
>also argue, I believe, that these notions don't belong.
Yes, I have to agree with Adam on this one. Its not so much that they
don't belong, but that they don't seem to *exist*. I (still) have
never seen an account of these ideas of firstness, secondness,
thirdness and fourthness - whoops, sorry, strike that last - which
come anywhere close to warranting their inclusion in any practical
ontology, and I have absolutely no idea what anyone would want to do
with them. Maybe if a Peircian partisan could actually SAY (without,
please, quoting the Master, whose pronouncements on this topic are
completely impossible to even parse coherently, let alone understand
or formalize) what these are intended to mean, what relations they
have to other things, etc., maybe the topic could move forward. But I
have my doubts.
Bear in mind, whoever tackles this task, that the final container for
this intended meaning must be some set of axioms in a formal logical
language (or equivalent). Documentation is fine, but if there is some
topic that cannot, by its very nature, even begin to be captured in
this way, then it is probably best left in silence. For example, I
wouldn't suggest that we include an ontology for subjective
impressions of colors.
Pat
PS. As an example of the kind of thing I have in mind, start with
Firstness. I take it that this is a property of something (since it
ends in "ness"), and I gather in fact that it is a property of
properties, characterizing those which attach to their object in some
very 'basic' way, as it were directly, without reference to any other
thing; what some people call 'essential' or 'intrinsic' properties.
If this is more or less right, then we might expect to see axioms
like this (?):
(and (Firstness P) (P ?x)) implies ...
Now, what such axioms could be written? Are there any general facts
about P and ?x that might be inferrable from the firstness of P that
would not be inferrable from the simple truth of P applying to ?x ?
What??
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