Re: SUO: RE: RE: Re: Missing Ingredients
Richard Cooper wrote:
> Yes, but the term 'individual' has a very specific meaning
> of concreteness in FOL. The question is of great importance
> to me, so I repeat it, and hope for some comments:
>
> Is an abstract concept (e.g., bird) an 'individual' in the
> logical sense, or is only 'red robin on front lawn' an
> individual in that sense?
>
> Having found logic an excellent mechanism to apply to the
> world, and finding philosophic works tragically simplistic,
> I am very interested in the answer to this question.
>
> Hoping for a clear response,
> Rich
As I said, there's been a *lot* written on questions of identity,
and what constitutes an individual in KR. Nicola Guarino in particular
has a number of documents (google will find his publications page).
Cyc's ontology has #$individual as:
"#$Individual is the collection of all individuals: things that
are _not_ sets or collections. Individuals might be concrete or
abstract, and include (among other things) physical objects,
events, numbers, relations, and groups.
Ontological assertions always in my opinion operate from a specific
context, level, viewpoint. So in one sense, me, Murray, I am an
individual. At one level. At another level I'm a collection of
organs, body parts, etc. But at the level of the *question* (IOW,
anchoring it in a context), "is Murray an individual?", you can
define me as one. This is a very simplistic example of the question
of context that I've been on about, but I think it important to
note that what constitutes a "collection" or an "individual" is
dependent upon the context of the statement. You have to anchor
every statement in its context, like laying out the base set of
assumptions for each thing you say. It's laborious, but necessary
in order to not be ambiguous.
"Robin" is a name for a species of bird. At the level of inquiry,
if one is happy assuming that species actually exist and that "bird"
is a collection (in the Cyc sense) or a zoological class, then that
robin on your front lawn is an individual. Cyc does have a bit of
documentation on this, though it's of course nothing compared to the
volumes that have been written on the subject:
http://www.cyc.com/cycdoc/course/collections-and-individuals.html
Though pointing you to volumes of information is I'm certain now
what you want to hear. But you should also note that if you live
in the US, the "robin" on your font lawn is a different species
than the "robin" on my front lawn (or "front garden") here in the
UK. Again, context.
I guess one thing that should be obvious is that nothing I'm
proposing should ever create statements that don't seem logically
or intuitively true. It's just a layer upon those statements that
says that they're true in a specific context, that relations go
from being diadic (dyadic) to being triadic. You go from a yin-
yang two-way polarity to what you find in Shinto or Korean
Buddhism, a three-pole yin-yang, that third pole anchoring the
dyadic statement in a context or environment (which in Shinto
is exactly what it symbolizes).
Jon's "zeroth order logic" is an attempt to create a logic that
is built upon things similar to this -- for a full explication,
I must point to Jon and his writings. I've myself spent the last
year or so trying to come to an understanding of the implications
of this, so I don't think I could summarize easily. I've been
banging on Jon to come up with a simpler explication, something
digestible.
I hope this was clear(er).
Murray
......................................................................
Murray Altheim http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK .
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