SUO: Re: ontology as science
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Rich,
There's a part of my onoing dissertation draft
that is designed to handle this sort of issue.
It's a bit too repetitively written because I
actually came at what is pretty much the same
structure from 3 different directions without
noticing the convergence until the last moment.
We followers of Peirce, of course, have no ideas
that we can call our own, and this one is really
just another variation on dominant Peircean themes,
in particular, the idea that sign relations are the
adequate, necessary, and sufficient contexts for all
practical accounts of semiotic processes, including
as special cases: computation, dialogue, inference,
information, inquiry, logic, reasoning, and thought.
I will maybe see about putting some excerpts on the Ontology List,
if I can stand to do that without having to re-write the whole mess.
Jon Awbrey
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Richard Cooper wrote:
>
> John F. Sowa wrote:
>
> [snip]
> > Cyc supports contextual differences with microtheories, and
> > we need a similar modular mechanism in any proposed SUO.
> >
> > John Sowa
>
> I've read the Cyc stuff about microtheories, but it isn't
> exactly a piece of tutorial elegance. IOW I don't understand
> the motivation behind it, the broad points of implementation,
> or the alternative choices that could have been made instead.
>
> Certainly context is specific to a conversation, or a problem
> to be solved, or a lesson to be taught. But isn't context
> also decomposed into other (sub)contexts pretty much like
> OOD handles scopes? The present OOD methodologies don't deal
> well with scopes, using the dot notation to reach any object
> from any other object. This isn't a very good solution
> because many separately designed units have to have access
> to nearly all the other units in a large program. Polymorphism
> is a start at improvement, but only just barely.
>
> It would be nice if there were a more formal way to represent
> contexts, nestings, decompositions, and so forth.
>
> In XML, the namespaces are no better than in OOD. I know of
> no existing solution to this problem, but it lies at the heart
> of the exponential nature of software testing and debugging.
> A change in one unit can cause zillions of changes in other
> units because references from the other units are not very
> transparent to the design of the changing unit.
>
> Does anyone have a better solution they're willing to share?
>
> Thanks,
> Rich
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