Re: SUO: *Date 19 Mar 2002 -- Modus Ponens
Excellent Jon!
Are you joining me against the SUO crowd?
Some of the "assumptions" that, to me, seem questionable and shared
by most people involved in ontology projects (alas, not only SUO!) are:
1) There exist ultimately a *perfect* all encompassing ontology that allows
describing everything, and we have to chase for it however distant it be.
2) There *must* be for each concept a *true* denomination and everybody
have to agree to use it.
This must be a deeply ingrained desire of the human psyché
(a need for safety?) because it appears in Confucianism as well
as in SF litterature like from Ursula K. Le Guin.
There is also a funny anecdote (reported by Bateson or someone of
his bunch, don't remember) about the german speaking inhabitants
of Tyrol getting angry about italian speakers calling a horse
"cavallo" where it's obvious the right name is "pferd".
Best.
-- Jean-Luc Delatre
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"Nothing happens unless first a dream." - Carl Sandburg
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http://perso.club-internet.fr/jld/ -- GSM: +33 6 11 24 06 29
Jon Awbrey a écrit :
>
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> Ontology As A Way Of Putting Things
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> | When you are criticising the philosophy of an epoch, do not chiefly direct
> | your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it
> | necessary explicitly to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions
> | which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously
> | presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know
> | what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever
> | occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of
> | types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems
> | constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.
> |
> | ANW, SMW, page 48.
> |
> | Alfred North Whitehead,
> |'Science and the Modern World',
> | Lowell Lectures 1925,
> | Free Press, New York, NY, 1967.
>
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