SUO: *Date 16 Feb 2002
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SUO WG Members,
I gather from my off-list comments that some people
get me all wrong -- they think I'm saying that this
project is impossible, that any notion of designing
an onotological theory that is standard enough, and
uppery enough, to get the job done is just destined
to fail. That's not what I'm saying at all. And I
wouldn't waste any of our times with it if it was.
I'm just saying that we won't get there this way,
not in this direction, and not trying to work on
the long-shakey grounds of what appears to be
our current set of (non)working assumptions.
So my hope is that, by looking at these nigh unto unconscious
assumptions that many people are currently taking for granted,
that we can find a much steadier ground for staging this work.
And I do see plenty of positively constructive ideas in that
direction, once a more solid ground becomes relatively clear.
Maybe I should stress some of the other things that I am not saying.
I am not saying that inter-communicability and inter-operability are
impossible. In fact, I take it for granted that these things happen
all the time in everyday life among intelligent creatures, from mice
to men and back again, so the question is one of an established form:
What are the grounds of this possibility already in progress, and how
can we but further it a little? It's a generic sort of question that
one can apply to communication, inquiry, intelligence, understanding,
workability, or whatever.
Last time I pointed to "Aristotle's Model" (AM) of the sign relation,
mostly to our culture's undying but very largely unconscious fixation
within its aspects, as one of the main obstacles to further progress.
This idea, that there just has to be some sort of a "common sense",
that is to say, a "canonical concept" or a "mutual mental meaning"
for everything under the sun, and that all we have to do is resort
to the canon in order to resolve all of our communication problems,
might have been a fair first approximation to answering the question
of how communication among diversely grammaticized creatures might be
possible at all, but I think that the evidence is in and all around us
that it just could not be the whole story of how understanding occurs.
Just to keep things as down to earth as we possibly can, let us go back to
my earlier example, "based on incidents from real life", as the blurb goes:
| The Chair of a Mathematics Department
| sends a memo to the Faculty that says:
|
| The Curriculum Committee will meet in Room 432 at 1 today
| to evaluate the new teaching modules for teaching modules.
Nobody even blinks, a few people smile, even smirk, but their
underlying understanding is not in the least impaired thereby.
How is this possible?
Suppose that there really is some sort of "ontology in the head" (OITH),
a theoretical data structure or knowledge base of sorts or unsorts, that
people use to memo-ize the memo as it flies into the circular files that
one tends to find ur-located round about their e-desks or their p+desks,
as the case may be. Can this OITH really have the sort of architexture
or the type of archetypture that we have mostly been whiling away our
days and our nights discursing?
I doubt it.
Nor do I see the plausibility of pretending that people
jump from one "namespace" to another in the time that
it takes them to parse from the last quarter to the
finish line of that obstacular-course sentence.
It has been said that we are compiling a "posh dictionary". Pish posh.
I have seen some posh dictionaries in the works, and this working group
simply displays none of the discipline or even the basic understanding
of the nature of the task that it'd take to do any such thing. Yet.
Data for next time:
http://www.hyperdictionary.com/
http://www.harcourt.com/dictionary/
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/
http://www.hyperdictionary.com/dictionary?define=module
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Module.html
Jon Awbrey
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