RE: SUO: 2000-7-26 example - nature of organisation
Dear John,
This looks like violent agreement.
See comments below.
Matthew West
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: John F. Sowa [mailto:sowa@bestweb.net]
> Sent: 03 September 2001 17:49
> To: West, Matthew R SITI-GREA-UK
> Cc: 'mail@ChrisPartridge.net'; standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org;
> phayes@ai.uwf.edu; guarino@ladseb.pd.cnr.it
> Subject: 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.
MW: I think supplement. Of course you get more mileage out of
extensionalist mereology with a 4D view.
>
> 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.
MW: Yes, I am surprised how little seems to have been done in this area.
>
> 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.
MW: Personally I would not touch modal operators with a barge pole,
so no argument from me here.
>
> 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
MW: Yes, my thinking is at least along similar lines.
>
> John Sowa
>