SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema
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LIS. Discussion Note 11
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Matthew,
Passing over some points that we will probably see again,
hopefully when we're all a lot smarter, and focusing on:
LIS: | possible_individual
|
| A <possible_individual> is a <thing>
| that exists in space and time.
|
| This includes:
|
| - things where any of the space time dimensions are
| vanishingly small,
|
| - those that are either all space for any time,
| or all time and any space,
|
| - the entirety of all space time,
|
| - things that actually exist, or have existed,
|
| - things that are fictional or conjectured and
| possibly exist in the past, present or future,
|
| - temporal parts (states) of other individuals,
|
| - things that have a specific position, but zero extent in
| one or more dimensions, such as points, lines, and surfaces.
|
| In this context existence is based upon being imaginable within
| some consistent logic, including actual, hypothetical, planned,
| expected, or required individuals.
|
| EXAMPLE. The pump with serial number ABC123,
| Battersea Power Station, Sir Joseph Whitworth,
| Shakespeare, and the starship "Enterprise" can be
| represented by instances of <possible_individual>.
|
| EXPRESS specification:
|
| ENTITY possible_individual
|
| SUBTYPE OF (thing);
|
| END_ENTITY;
|
| http://www.tc184-sc4.org/wg3ndocs/wg3n1328/lifecycle_integration_schema/lexical/possible_individual.html
JA: I am trying to figure out:
JA: (1) what you mean by the term "possible_individual" ...
MW: Reading:
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/Documents/Spatio-temporal-Paradigm.pdf
may help to understand what we are getting at.
JA: I will look at it, in good time, but you understand that I am
presently following my nose like a good parser-positer-prover
should, and I am obliged to ask myself, and you, whether this
text in front of me permits of formalization in a systematic,
step-by-step fashion. Now, I am not so grindstone-nosed as
to think that it might be done in a single pass without any
need to backtrack, but if you do not see at least some of
these issues that I am encountering as representing real
obstructions to the formalization process, that need to
be addressed, then I might as well drop this task from
the queue, so to speak.
MW: I'm following my nose too. I don't claim to know
much about axiomatisation, and I'm hoping to learn.
MW: The document above is quite short, and outlines
the approach we are taking. Your choice of course.
Actually, it's you who chose the rasher of your FAT (File Access Table)
to toss on the barbie here, and we're deep in the middle of that formal
fryer at the moment, so I guess I will leave it to your culinary acumen
to pick what cuts you want to roast next.
JA: (2) whether that meaning can be formalized
in terms of an axiomatic theory ...
JA: (3) what sorts of things come under the
heading of a "possible_individual".
JA: (A) From what you say in the Example clause, I take it that
you consider the Starship Enterprise to be an instance
of a <possible_individual>.
MW: Yes.
JA: (B) From what you say in the defining clause, I take it that
you consider the Starship Enterprise to be a <thing> that
exists in space and time.
MW: Yes, but perhaps in some possible world
(or more appropriately universe).
JA: That is, of course, a whole new ballpark, one that is
positively filled with many popular and entertaining
amusements, but I personally would look for another
way to understand, in rational scientific terms,
what is really going on with the phemomena of
truth in fiction.
MW: I'm open to suggestions, but that is what we do
in the absence of anything we have found better.
JA: (C) From what you say in the context clause,
I take it that you consider whatever exists
to be "imaginable within some consistent logic".
MW: Yes. If the existance of an object is logically inconsistent,
then we are not interested in it. The star ship Enterprise is
a good example of something imaginable, which includes things
that are in our real world/universe.
JA: (.`.) Therefore, I must conclude that you consider the
Starship Enterprise to come under the heading
"imaginable within some consistent logic".
MW: Correct.
JA: I am just asking for clarification of these properties that you
mention in defining or explaining the term "possible_individual".
JA: By what sort of decision process can I judge whether the
Starship Enterprise is "imaginable within some consistent
logic, including actual, hypothetical, planned, expected,
or required individuals"?
JA: In other words:
JA: What is the operational definition of
"imaginable within some consistent logic".
MW: See above.
JA: Sorry, I have not seen anything like
a real definition of that yet,
operational or otherwise.
MW: By logically consistent we meant that the existance
of objects did not present a logical inconsistency.
I recognize this as the "mark of mathematical existence" (MOME).
But most folks would draw, if they could figure out how, a very
hard line between this brand of mathematical existence and, well,
the existential kind, if you know what I mean. In other words,
there are models of theories that have very little attachment
to physical or spacetime realities, and so we still have to
decide which of the logical models are analogical models
of any given objective domain in realworld experience.
MW: Imaginable means that they could exist in this or some possible world.
Imaginable means "able to be an object of images".
This will bring us quickly back to sign relations.
Conceivable means "able to be an object of concepts".
This brings us quickly back to the "pragmatic maxim".
Matthew,
At this juncture so many roads diverge that I despair of enumerating them.
There's an expository technique that many people resort to when they want
discuss a scientific or technical question in colloquial or popular terms,
and that is to introduce or perhaps to invent some marked literary device
that we might call an "Asterism", say, Bachelorism, Evening*/Morning*, the
*Ship Enterprise, and so on, when what they are really talking about is the
problematic of understanding how it is that so-called "hypothetical entities"
serve any practical purpose in theoretical mathematics or in empirical science.
So the option opens up of going off on what is actually
a very interesting and perfectly respectable tangent,
picking up the gage of "truth in fiction" (TIF) and
engaging the terms of its contingenies with all due
diligence and earnest, and, strange as it may seem,
much of what is adventured and animadverted along
those lines is actually relevant to understanding
all of the figures of hypothesis and all of the
fixtures of belief that play themselves out as
they will or nill in mathematics and science.
I am aware of many realworld applications that would
actually require us to address all of these problems
and more in our formally implemented theories, if we
can think of computationally effective ways to do it
all well, and so these tangents present live options.
Still, it's really a bit much to lay on one person's
plate, at one particular sitting, at one day's feast.
So I think that it would help me to return to the questions that
I used at the beginning of the Discussion Period thread to focus
my own attention on what it is that we might have a real hope of
achieving in the short time frame of a couple weeks' discussion:
| Could you tell us what a typical application is like
| and what your ontology does for you in such a setting?
|
| Could you pick out a few terms or concepts that you think
| are especially important and tell us how defining them the
| way you do is critical to success in practical applications?
|
| http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10710.html
I think that the more concrete detail we can bring out to fill in
the spaces currently swept out by the abstractions of <thing> and
<abstract_object> and <possible_individual> and so on, the better
we will come to comprehend what is really desirable and feasible
in the present setting.
Jon Awbrey
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