SUO: Re: General Design
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JA = Jon Awbrey
TJ = Tom Johnston
TJ: Very well put. I by no means intend to denigrate the theory found in these
discussions. I only mean to say that some attention should be paid to real
world examples of situations to which that theory will eventually be put.
I am a practitioner first and foremost, a theoretician as and when I can be.
So I'm starting to think that one of the things I could contribute to this
forum is a series of real world vignettes, along the lines of the customer
and bill of material examples in my previous email.
TJ: The people I work with on an assignment, the clients who hire me, and the
other data architect consultants with whom I compete, all have little idea
of the relevance of theory to the practial work we do (more accurately,
their idea of relevant theory is the first three relational normal forms,
and nothing more). From the examples of supposedly real world problems I
find in computer science textbooks (e.g. teachers, students, classes, for
database design), I conclude that academics have little understanding and
appreciation of the complexities involved in representing truly real world
data in our databases. I am either falling between those two stools, or
building a bridge between them. The latter is what I am trying to do, at
any rate. Currently, that means reading (re-reading) Hughes and Cresswell's
modal logic book, some at least of your contributions, and some of John Sowa's,
always trying to relate this material to the world of business databases that
I work in.
Tom,
My purpose in looking at these old turning points is "critical" --
there will always be those who equivalence that to "denigration" --
but I will need to lay down many more bits of the raw DB before
turning again to reflect on it all from the "Monday AM QB POV".
Due to several twists of fate that I am still trying to untangle,
I ended up taking bunches of theoretical courses in this and that,
but all the work that anybody ever paid me for, aside from teaching,
kept me strung out between data-base and statistical packages that
can at best be judged "brutally emphatically recalcitrant" in their
abilities to work together. In striving to integrate all of these
factors, I typically found myself serving as the interfarce between
the quantitative and the qualitative factions in each environment
where I found a niche. Still working on the same task, gratis,
if a bit thankless, but that's okay, somebody's got to do it.
I have already contributed a few vignettes that were adapted from prime-time,
major-funded research that happened to fall into this bardo between the worlds
of Quan and Qual -- I wish you better luck with yours. I am perfectly in tune
with trying to work up reasonable facsimulations of real-world examples that
might be catchy enough to capture the imagination of the learned ontologer.
Jon Awbrey
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JA: It will probably take me a while to read through your whole message,
but here are some of the pre-canned thoughts that come to mind so far:
JA: Consider relations of the folowing sorts:
Database X records that Y likes Z.
Database X records that Y means Z.
Theory X entails that Y prefers Z.
Theory X entails that Y implies Z.
JA: More abstractly and generally:
Source X indicates that Y is L to Z.
JA: Where L is some 2-adic relation that
is fixed throughout the discussion.
JA: The problems that we know as "intercomm(unicability)" and
"interop(erability)" only become problems when these sorts
of relations, and their whole assembled families, are "generic",
"in general position", or "non-degenerate, that is, when different
databases, theories, or sources don't all say the same things about
the 2-adic relations in question.
JA: I hope that this set-up sounds familiar by now, as I will have to put off
further elaboration until another day, but this is one of the nitty-gritty
practical reasons why folks in this working group find themselves forced to
think about the issues of intens/tionality, modality, propositional attitudes
and all that. It is, by the way, one of the resaons that I am taking the time
to read Russell's early discussions of these matters, eventually to compare
them with Peirce's, which he would have done well to read, but apparently
did not take the trouble to do so. Here is where I am so far in that:
POLA. Philosophy Of Logical Atomism -- Ontology List
01. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg04939.html
...
21. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg04996.html
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