SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema
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LIS. Discussion Note 7
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LIS: | thing
|
| A <thing> is anything that is or may be thought about or perceived,
| including material and non-material objects, ideas, and actions.
|
| Every <thing> is either
| a <possible_individual>,
| or an <abstract_object>.
|
| NOTE 1. Every <thing> is identifiable within a system.
| System identifiers created by other systems and received
| as part of a data exchange may be stored for future reference
| as an identification, referring to the originating organisation
| or system.
|
| NOTE 2. Every example provided for other entity data types
| declared in this schema is also an example of <thing>.
|
| http://www.tc184-sc4.org/wg3ndocs/wg3n1328/lifecycle_integration_schema/lexical/thing.html
JA: You are saying that you are really only thinking about things
that have identifiers in given system, or names in a certain
context of discussion. This is very significant and needs to
be elevated to the level of an explicit principle, instead of
being left implicit in a note that is likely to be neglected,
in other words, relegated to a hidden axiom or constraint
whose consequences are not critically reflected on.
MW: I think it is more that we are saying that if you want to
say something about an object under this standard, you have
to be prepared to give that object an identifier. This is a
practical rather than philosophical statement. You will find
elsewhere under representation a quite general approach to
identification. Providing this "system unique identifier"
was more a piece of practical design. I.e. philosophically
you can ignore it.
JA: In formal computational terms, a "system unique identifier" (SUI)
of a denoted object is known as a "gödel number" (gnumb). There
are gnumbs for objects in the external world, whether abstract or
concrete, and there are gnumbs for every finite piece of text in
the formal language that we use, the latter gnumbs being what we
are really creating when we "quote" that piece of text.
JA: A measure of how "critically reflective" a formal system can be,
or help us to be, about these external and internal worlds both,
is determined by many pickwickian details of the gnumb function
gnumb : X -> N, where N is the set of nonnegative integers, and
X is typically thought of as being built up in layers from some
initial X_0 that we might treat as the "initial external world".
JA: From another angle, if we think of SUI's as "coordinates" of objects,
that have their meanings relative to a particular frame of reference,
but may be total gödellygeek from the POV of another reference frame,
then what we have here is the task of intercommunication among codes
that we have charged ourselves to discharge.
JA: So there's a lot more to say about this,
but the thrust of it all is that we can
no longer just shove these issues aside,
under whatever category label we assign.
MW: Then I suggest you consider this attribute deleted for the
purposes of the use of this material within this forum.
Matthew,
I don't understand what you are saying here.
Perhaps you mean to delete Note 1, but that note is
key to specifying in operational terms what you mean
by identity, identification, individuals, and also a
<thing> as "anything that is or may be thought about",
since those thoughts do not enter into public discourse
with being translated into signs of some kind. That is,
the defining clause for <thing> cannot be separated from
the issues of Note 1.
Jon Awbrey
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