ONT RE: Re: General Design
John:
One way to contextualize my earlier email today, and my still earlier
comments re Rorty, Quine, Wittgenstein 2, etc, is to say that I agree with
all four of your points. My notion that family resemblances can be combined
with Aristotelian definition is perhaps my less formally rigorous way of
making some of those same points. I still have to spell out what I mean, but
I wouldn't be surprised to find, after doing so, that you and others had
already reached that conclusion, and had already expressed it more
rigorously than I ever could.
On the other hand, that position of mine is consistent with the thesis that
analytic/synthetic is a matter of degree; and I'm not sure you agree. It is
consistent with synonymy in natural language being a matter of fuzzy
boundaries; and I'm not sure you agree. It is consistent with Rorty's
anti-representationalism and rejection of a correspondence theory of truth;
and I'm not sure you agree. So I'll continue on, and see what happens.
I am grateful that you're better versed in the language I am comfortable
with than I am in yours. Otherwise we wouldn't be having these
conversations!
Tom Johnston
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-standard-upper-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org
[mailto:owner-standard-upper-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org]On Behalf Of
John F. Sowa
Sent: Monday, August 11, 2003 4:11 PM
To: Jon Awbrey
Cc: Kenneth Fields; Ontology; protege-discussion@SMI.Stanford.EDU; SUO;
cg@cs.uah.edu
Subject: SUO: Re: General Design
Jon,
I am on my way to California tomorrow, and I have a million things
to finish up before I leave. So I'll have to wait until later,
perhaps this weekend, to send more info.
> Perhaps you can explain to us how "'knowledge soup' -- the loosely
organized,
> semi-structured mix of whatever people have in their heads" can be canned
in
> FOL cans, because this is a problem that has exercised me for way too many
> years now, and though I may say "I think I can" till I can not say it any
> more, I just can't make myself believe that can be done any more, not
> in that "direct and literal" (DAL) fashion with which ontologicists
> keep on trying to curry favor with the geists of atomists past.
Of course, not. The main reason why WordNet is more flexible than
Cyc, Sumo, Dolce, or any other axiomatized ontology is simple;
The axioms get in the way.
That simple observation is heresy, which will bring down more threats
of excommunication than a gay bishop. But it is a fact: the reason
why anybody wants axioms is to make their ontology more precise and
better adapted to whatever little niche they currently inhabit. But
if you want an ontology that is general enough to apply to anything
and everything, you can't live with a hot-house pansy that can only
survive when every weed in sight has been extirpated.
> Failing that, and GOL knows any sensate person ought to know that it's
failed by now,
> the only still "logical" alternative seems to be something like the
indirect approach,
> via the explicit recognition that our models are abductively approximate
analogues of
> the real thing that is ever out there, beyond us, and thus that we have no
choice but
> to begin in more amorphous, proto-formal settings like sign relations,
taking serious
> Peirce's notion of "logic as (a specialized form of) semiotics".
My proposed solution is based on some principles that I have been
preaching for as long as anybody has been willing to listen (which
isn't very long, for most of them):
1. You cannot build a hierarchy by drawing trees (or lattices)
by hand -- you must have tools that can derive the hierarchy
automatically from whatever set of distinctions are embodied
in the ontology. (One example of such a tool is the Toscana
implementation(s) of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA), but there
are also other similar tools that could be used.)
2. You cannot assume that any given hierarchy is fixed for all
time -- it is only fixed until somebody adds another axiom.
If their axiom makes a new distinction, they will push a
button to run the hierarchy-derivation program to redraw the
lattice. If you're lucky, the new axiom won't change very
much. But if you're unlucky, it might reorganize everything.
3. If you need to preserve your axioms as long as anybody is
using some application that depends on them, then you can't
let people push buttons that will change your hierarchy just
because they want to change theirs. The net result is that
the total hierarchy bifurcates, trifurcates, or multifurcates
into incompatible contexts, modules, microtheories, or
whatever you want to call them.
4. Meanwhile, nobody wants to learn a new language with a totally
different vocabulary just because somebody decided to make
a new distinction. Therefore, they just recycle their old
words and force the lexicographers or WordNetters to add more
word senses or synsets. And then you have to add more ropes
(or pointers) to align the terminological hierarchies with
the multipicity of axiomatized hierarchies.
And as you pointed out, Peirce recognized these problems a century
ago. He explained, as you said, that any theory of logic is merely
a subset of the broader theory of semeiotic, which he designed to
accommodate all these ways that people and other sentient beings
organize their ways of making sense of what they experience.
So I really shouldn't complain too much that people have been
ignoring what I've been preaching since 1987, since they have
been ignoring what Peirce was preaching for at least a century
or more before that.
John