SUO: RE: Lifecycle Integration Schema
Dear Jon,
See comments below.
Matthew West
Principal Consultant
Shell Information Technology International Limited
Shell Centre, London SE1 7NA, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 20 7934 4490 Other Tel: +44 7796 336538
Email: matthew.west@shell.com
Internet: http://www.shell.com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:jawbrey@att.net]
> Sent: 27 September 2003 15:25
> To: SUO; West, Matthew R SITI-ITPSIE
> Cc: Murray Altheim
> Subject: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema
>
>
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> LIS. Discussion Note 47
>
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> JA = Jon Awbrey
> MW = Matthew West
>
> Matthew,
>
> Well, it's Saturday, so let me kick back and
> look at the big picture. We can get back to
> the old grindstone soon enough on Monday.
>
> Deleting points that seem covered well enough for now --
>
> MW: In our wider architecture we recognise that there might
> be many views
> of what abstract is. The architecture supports and
> expects any number
> of models. The issue is how to translate between them.
> The model I
> have presented here is the upper level of what the
> architecture calls
> an Integration Model. That is, it is not so much itself
> intended to
> represent every possible way of looking at the world
> directly, but to
> be a way of representing the world that is sufficiently
> unambiguous
> that people can map their own views of the world to it, and thus
> to each other, with a high degree of precision. This is actually
> what ended up driving us towards a 4D view for this purpose, since
> it has seemed to us to have the greatest clarity.
>
> This sounds good. I never get the 3d/4d thing, since most
> state spaces that I worry about have far more dimensions than
> that, even if they grow in leaps of 3 dims or bounds of 4 dims
> at a time.
MW: Well I have dealt with spaces of up to 200 dimensions, but
what is special about space and time is that mereology continues
to work when you move from 3D to this 4D. It doesn't when you
throw in say temperature or pressure.
> But I do hear you saying stuff that sounds vaguely
> system-theoretic, and that causes my ears to pointy up a bit,
> Spockily speaking.
>
> Again, one of the things that I notice is that many candidate
> ontologies,
> at the starting gates of the SUO track or elsewhere, and no
> matter what
> line they imagine they may be toeing at the moment, is a superficially
> similar primal distinction between Abstract and Adstract, or whatever
> the opposite of abstract may be in their local argot. So I would
> like to try and get ahead of the pack a bit when it comes down
> to the wire of comparative ontologizing, and I can do this by
> comparing your idea of <abstract_object>/<possible_individual>
> to the types of distinctions that others draw, or try to draw,
> elsewhere.
>
> There is a rather vast literature on abstraction that is
> currently extant
> and actively in use. Understatement of the Millennium. Even
> if you keep
> to the pointer-headed linkdom of computer science, the topic
> Abstraction,
> along with its relations to Analogy and Modularization, have
> constituted
> regular themes in the standard computer science curriculum, at least
> since the days when I personally woke up and began paying attention
> to such things. Progress, real comparative progress, on SUO will
> critically depend on exploiting what bits of wisdom may happen
> to have accumulated in these mountains of ocean floor sediment.
>
> JA: One of the features that points to an abstract object or
> a hypostatic abstraction is its being known by description,
> in other words, by the predicates that are attributed to it
> in remote reports of some variety, or in the various stories
> and theories that are spun about it, instead of being known
> more concretely and directly by acquaintance. That is one
> of the marks of all of the things that I mentioned before:
> dormitive virtues, egos, numbers, quarks, sweetness, the
> Starship Enterprise, and last not not least, unicorns.
>
> MW: Sweetness is a property that some individuals have.
> Within our model that would make it a class which
> is abstract. The things that were sweet would be
> members of that class.
>
> JA: I think that maybe it will be best to stick with this
> shortest and sweetest of examples for a while, as it
> appears to present the least number of distractions.
>
> JA: I think that the critical thing for our purposes is to
> try and see how
> the process of abstraction actually works in action, and
> here the best
> description that I've seen is given by Peirce. So I
> recommend it for
> continuing consideration:
>
> CSP: | The most ordinary fact of perception, such as
> | "it is light", involves 'precisive' abstraction,
> | or 'prescission'. But 'hypostatic' abstraction,
> | the abstraction which transforms "it is light" into
> | "there is light here", which is the sense which I shall
> | commonly attach to the word abstraction (since 'prescission'
> | will do for precisive abstraction) is a very special mode of
> | thought. It consists in taking a feature of a percept
> or percepts
> | (after it has already been prescinded from the other
> elements of the
> | percept), so as to take propositional form in a
> judgment (indeed, it
> | may operate upon any judgment whatsoever), and in
> conceiving this fact
> | to consist in the relation between the subject of that
> judgment and
> | another subject, which has a mode of being that merely
> consists in
> | the truth of propositions of which the corresponding
> concrete term
> | is the predicate.
> |
> | http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10966.html
>
> CSP: | Thus, we transform the proposition, "honey is sweet",
>
> MW: This is what we take to indicate set membership.
>
> CSP: | into "honey possesses sweetness".
>
> MW: We take possesses to be a synonym for classifies.
>
> Many things to do today, will pick it up at this point when
> I can concentrate better and go through it more carefully.
>
> Jon Awbrey
>
> CSP: | "Sweetness" might be called a fictitious thing, in one sense.
> | But since the mode of being attributed to it 'consists' in no
> | more than the fact that some things are sweet, and it is not
> | pretended, or imagined, that it has any other mode of being,
> | there is, after all, no fiction. The only profession made is
> | that we consider the fact of honey being sweet under the form
> | of a relation; and so we really can. I have selected
> sweetness
> | as an instance of one of the least useful of abstractions. Yet
> | even this is convenient. It facilitates such thoughts
> as that the
> | sweetness of honey is particularly cloying; that the
> sweetness of
> | honey is something like the sweetness of a honeymoon; etc.
> |
> | C.S. Peirce, CP 4.235, "The Simplest Mathematics",
> | Chapter 3 of the "Minute Logic", Jan-Feb 1902.
> |
> | http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10966.html
>
> JA: Referring to a few of Peirce's standard discussions
> of "hypostatic abstraction" (HA), the main thing
> about HA is that it turns an adjective or some
> part of a predicate into an extra subject,
> upping the arity of the main predicate
> in the process.
>
> JA: For example, a typical case of HA occurs in the transformation
> from "honey is sweet" to "honey possesses sweetness", which we
> could choose to represent in several different ways as follows:
>
> JA: | Sweet(honey) ~~~> Possesses(honey, sweetness)
> |
> | S(h) ~~~> P(h, s)
> |
> | S P
> | o o
> | | ~~~> |
> | o o
> | h <h,s>
> |
> | ^
> | [S] ~~~> /P\
> | | o->-o
> | | | |
> | o o o
> | h h s
>
> JA: The chief thing about this form of grammatical
> transformation is that we
> abstract the adjective "sweet" from the main predicate,
> thus arriving at
> a new, increased-arity predicate "possesses", and as a
> by-product of the
> reaction, as it were, precipitating out the substantive
> "sweetness" as a
> new subject of the new predicate.
>
> cf: http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10967.html
>
> JA: I think that I can point out at this juncture that the HA process,
> as Peirce describes it, and as I try to picture it here, is akin
> to the process of lambda abstraction that provides us with one
> very successful model of computation, underpinning the tongue
> of Lisp, just for a taste.
>
> MW: The starship enterprise does exist in space-time, but not
> necessarily ours. I can see that this is abstract in the
> sense that it may never be real in our world, and certainly
> isn't a present or historical object, but it does not fit our
> definition of abstract.
>
> MW: Unicorns are fictional animals that do not exist in our world
> but could exist in some other possible world, and would exist
> in space-time therefore they are individuals and not abstract.
>
> JA: The first thing that we have to decide here is what real
> use we want
> to make of these examples. If they're just intended as
> entertaining
> examples of fictitious entities, that's one thing. Any
> other example
> of a parabolic or theoretical term will do. If we have
> an application
> in mind where we would need to talk intelligently about
> the meaning of
> literary and mythical symbols, which is what many serious
> people would
> see as giving these examples a modicum of real interest,
> that's another
> thing. I once took courses in Literature and Film where
> we spent whole
> years on the study of themes like Archetype, Myth,
> Science Fiction, and
> Surrealism. There are lots of people out there who are
> interested in
> using logical representations and ontologies for just
> such things --
> many recent conversations with folks like Murray Altheim continue
> to remind me of this -- but spinning the gold of Arts and Letters
> into the hay of literal FOL travesties is not an intelligent way
> to address these interests and applications.
>
> JA: The maxim is: Logic should not make us stupid.
> Ergo, if it's making us stupid, it ain't logic.
>
> MW: My mapping so far between your abstract and our model is that
> your abstract is our abstract plus all possible_individuals
> that are not actual (in our world). I am uncertain about
> quarks and egos. You may be uncertain about my analysis.
>
> JA: But when you think about it, you will probably realize
> that this is yet another one of those distinctions that
> is more a matter of degree than an absolute dissection,
> since all data of perception is to some degree remote.
>
> JA: This has certain implications.
>
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