Re: SUO: 2000-7-26 example - nature of organisation
Matthew.
I agree.
JS> The moral that I derived from reading Simons' book is that the
> > title is misleading. It suggests that the notion of "part" and
> > mereology as a theory of parts are sufficient to serve as a
> > foundation for ontology.
>
> MW: I think this is to put claims into Peter's mouth that I don't
> think he made himself. I think Peter considers that he was dealing
> with an important ELEMENT of ontology that had been somewhat
> neglected.
Yes, I realize that Simons has a broader understanding of the issues.
But I also believe that the emphasis on mereology has led some people
to believe that it is a "silver bullet" that can solve many more
problems than it is actually capable of doing.
In particular, I think that classical extensionalist mereology is
quite useful as a replacement (or supplement) for set theory. As you
pointed out, however, it isn't very exciting in itself.
Intensionalist mereology is much more powerful (and also much more
difficult to characterize). But I would claim that its real power
comes from the intentions (with a "t") that determine the intensions
(with an "s"). I believe that the approach would be much more
flexible and much easier to axiomatize and represent if the
mereology were clearly distinguished from the intentions.
One important way of starting is to drop the modal operators
of necessity and possibility and move to a representation that
uses an explicit statement of what reasons, purposes, intentions,
laws, general principles, etc., make something necessary or
possible.
That is why I like Dunn's semantics for modality: it is a
refinement of Kripke's semantics (i.e., it gives exactly the same
truth values for every modal statement), but it also states the
explicit reason why something is considered possible or necessary.
For more detail, see Ch 5 of my KR book or my paper on contexts:
http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/contexts.htm
John Sowa