SUO: Re: Critique Of Non-Functional Reason
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| A. Automated Reasoning (AR)
|
| The standard will be suitable for automated logical inference
| to support knowledge-based reasoning applications.
|
| B. Inter-Operability (IO)
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| The standard will provide a basis for achieving Inter-Operability
| among various software and database applications.
[AB]
Let us pursue the question of how quantitative descriptions of the world
actually work out in practice, and see if we can pick up some pointers
that might readily be adapted or easily be transferred for use in the
more qualitative pictures of reality that we keep trying to draw by
means of our logical representations, for the sake, let us say, of
arriving at a far-reaching ontological view of parts of reality.
When we take up a quantitative setup like (R^k, R^k -> R) for the sake
of describing some piece of reality, virtual or otherwise, we think of
the points of the source R^k as "coding", "coordinating", "identifying",
or "itemizing" the elementary objects in the domain of interest, whether
we are thinking of events in spacetime or items on the grocery shelf, and
we think of the target R as arranging for another set of labels or values,
like field intensities or unit prices, to be attached to the entities of
our principal interest. This is the canonical picture, as commonly used
throughout the breadth and depth of the genre of quantitative description,
and all that remains for us to bear in mind from this point on is the fact
that there may indeed be many different, more or less equivalent and useful
systems of "identification", so we should not identify any of them with the
entities -- we identify the entities by means of them. Otherwise, we fall
into the error that is commonly known as "reifying the coordinate system",
or more poetically, "gilding the frame of reference".
Jon Awbrey
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