SUO: Re: Ontologies, Dictionaries, Registries
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The question continues to plague me: What is the proper relationship
between ontologies, regarded as coherent theories of content domains,
and dictionaries, encyclopedias, lexicons, registries, and so on?
Further reflections have tugged me first one way and then another,
but currently lead me to think that resources like these, since
they cannot be ontologies, or configure themselves into cogent
ontologies all by themselves, might more properly be seen as
the passively nutrient media on which live ontologies grow.
Look at the process that we observed before,
that led to this stage of lexical evolution:
| posh.1. elegant or fashionable
|
| posh.1.1. elegant
|
| posh.1.1.1. tasteful
|
| posh.1.2. fashionable
|
| posh.1.2.1. faddish
|
| posh.1.1.1 & posh.1.2.1 => contradiction.
We have just seen one of the ways that new concepts are created.
It looks like the cell division that an amoeba undergoes when
the amoeba has become too amoebic for its own good, and so
resolves its amorphous overextension by dividing in two,
and again, and then again, if need be, and just so long
as the available resources enable it to keep doing so.
From my own point of view on the matter, partly drawn to take part in the process,
I initially experienced a bit of uncertainty about the meaning of the word "posh",
an uncertainty that grew to acute proportions when I detected that fringes of its
further connotations were actually in logical conflict with one another, and so I
felt obliged to index the variety of nuances by way of artficially distinct terms.
And again I can recognize the theme from Kant that Peirce echoed here,
that concepts are formed to control the overweening manifold of sense:
| This paper is based upon the theory already established, that the function of
| conceptions is to reduce the manifold of sensuous impressions to unity, and that
| the validity of a conception consists in the impossibility of reducing the content
| of consciousness to unity without the introduction of it. (CSP, CP 1.545, CE 2.49).
Jon Awbrey
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