Re: The world may fundamentally be inexplicable
I received the following offline comment, and I gave
the same response I've been giving for the past
several years.
John Sowa
-------- Original Message --------
Nobody knows exactly how many theories will be needed:
> But I don't have any good idea **how many** logically
> different theories will in fact be required. I do have
> a strong suspicion that it will not be as many as one
> would suppose after a casual glance at the different
> upper ontologies that people have proposed.
But there are certain things that are pretty safe bets:
1. There will be categories called Time, Space, Object,
Process, etc.
2. There will be some assumptions common to all the
axiomatizations: time will have a before and
after, and space will have 3 dimensions.
3. But beyond that, all bets are off. It would be
a mistake to adopt situation calculus instead of
pi calculus for reasoning about time; it would be
a mistake to insist on either 3D or 4D treatments
of space-time; it would be a mistake to insist
that objects are "ontologically prior" to processes;
it would be a mistake to say that a vase and the
lump of clay from which it is made must be or must
not be considered different entities.
That's why the only thing you can insist on is a very
sparse, very limited set of common axioms. At that
level, you can't do much problem-oriented reasoning.
For more detailed reasoning in specific applications,
you need the problem-oriented modules or microtheories.
John