Re: Perdurantist planning problems (was: RE: RE: SUO: Re: BallotComment)
Chris and Pat,
I just wanted to comment on the following remark:
CP>This seems to me to illustrate the difference between a
(philosophical)
> >ontology and an epistemology. That the branching (that Pat describes below)
> >is a function of epistemology (what is known) rather than time.
The terms "philosophical ontology" and "epistemology" are so broad
that it's very hard to pin them down to anything meaningful or
useful in any particular application.
I prefer to use a much clearer distinction: a definition of something
vs. a criterion for recogizing or identifying something. What people
usually mean by "ontological" has to do with the way somrthing is
defined in principle, and by "epistemological" with the criteria
for identifying it in practice.
For example, one popular definition of Truth is "correspondence
with reality". The trouble is that the words "correspondence"
and "reality" are themselves very difficult to define, and the
combination of the two is also decidedly unobvious.
That is also a problem with Tarski's model theory, which is fine
as a definition. But unfortunately, if you try to apply it to
the real world, you discover that the "individuals" in the world
aren't clearly differentiated, and they aren't listed in nice,
neat n-tuples. So the real problems with applying Tarski's
definition comes with trying to check the truth values of the
ground-level clauses when no one has done the hard grubby work
of putting them into a relational DB.
John Sowa