RE: SUO: RE: Re: More KIF-ified Ontology Content
Dear Pat,
>
>
> >MW: Well I keep saying it, but the IIDEAS architecture and
> methodology
> >(ISO18876) really is trying to establish an environment
> within which this is
> >possible.
>
> Thanks for the pointer. Indeed this work does look interesting, but
> it seems (on a quick reading) to be chiefly concerned with extending
> and merging concept heirarchies, and issues such as whether two
> concepts should be treated as siblings under a new superconcept or
> whether one can be fitted under the other, etc..
MW: Well that is where you start, but not necessarily where you finish, and
I would rather say concept networks (mostly multiple hierarchies) than just
concept hierarchy.
>
> This is useful and productive work, but I honestly don't think it can
> be used to solve the problems Ive been pointing to. Or, more
> correctly, I think that if this kind of approach is used to solve
> them , then the UO will become simply a catalog of alternative
> philosophical approaches to ontology, since the relevant distinctions
> will be forced to such a high level in the abstraction heirachy that
> they will be higher than anything anyone wants to say in practice
> about anything.
MW: It is my experience that indeed the things people argue about the most
are at the highest levels, where as the day to day things people find easier
to agree on, because we can point at things to see whether we mean the same
thing or not. So for example, I doubt if any difficulty we might have on
agreeing what we meant by "red" would have anything to do with whether we
saw it as a property, that things could take up, or as a class whose members
were states, either individuals, or temporal parts of individuals. I would
expect the discussion to be around where the border was between red and
other adjacent colours. So "red" can fit into different frameworks with
different ways of understanding what being red means. I would further expect
to be able to translate between the different frameworks.
> Take almost any reasonably high-level concept (well,
> lower than Heraclitus), such as physical-object. A and B might agree
> that this category is needed, but what A means is a continuant, while
> what B means is a space-time history.
MW: The real question here is whether when A & B use the term "physical
object" they are referring to the same concept or not. Again within
different frameworks, the same name might refer to different concepts. As
far as I can see this is just the standard stuff of analysis (or as Jon - I
think - would call it inquiry).
MW: Having said that I would be quite interested in what you thought was the
difference between a continuant and a space-time history.
> This kind of disagreement is
> not a disagreement like that between C, who wants to classify
> airplanes with ships, and D, who wants to classify airplanes with
> birds. The IIDEAS architecture is a good way to approach a common
> ground between C and D, but there really is no common ground between
> A and B. Its not a matter of how they classify things; they don't
> 'see' airplanes in the same ontological way. They have fundamentally
> different ways of thinking about the process of carving up the world,
> rather than different categorizations of the things that you get
> after doing the carving.
MW: I am just at the end of changing my preferred way of seeing the world,
so I think I understand the problem here. Interestingly, it doesn't bother
me too much. Let me explain.
MW: Until recently I used as my baseline a viewpoint that said that there
were individual things like you, my car, classes, and associations, where an
association is a relationship that understands that it lasts for a period of
time. I have moved to a 4D approach, replacing individual things with
spatio-temporal extents, and associations with timeless relations. However,
I know very well how to take something from my old model and represent it in
the new model, and vice-versa. The limitation is that there are some things
that I can now represent that I could not before. This is to be expected,
and is due to the limitations in the previous model.
MW: How to make these transformations is precisely what the IIDEAS
architecture is for.
>
> (BTW, I think that what seems to me to be overoptimism about the
> prospects of the SUO among some folk might arise from their failure
> to appreciate that such incompatible conceptualizations can even
> exist, let alone all have their uses.)
MW: I have a simple attitude towards incompatible conceptualisations: they
mean we do not understand the world around us. The world around us is not
incompatible with itself, so if there are two theories about the world that
are incompatible, I expect there to be an underlying theory that can explain
why both of the incompatible theories work within the range that they are
found to be useful. The problem is that this underlying theory may not yet
have been discovered. We can then identify an area for research.
>
> If you use an IIDEAS style of resolution , you will have a global
> ontology that allows all ways of carving the world. But you can't
> just lump them all together, since A's way literally doesnt make
> sense in B's vocabulary, and vice versa; so you will have some
> very-high-level distinctions which are basically a kind of
> philosopher's catalog of different approaches to styles of conceptual
> individuation, with separate (and incommensurate) ontologies attached
> below each tip node.
MW: I suppose you could do that, but it isn't what I have in mind (see
above).
>
> As a well-known ontologist said to me a while back, this may be the
> first time in human history that governments and venture capitalists
> are willing to pay philosophers hard money to do philosophy, so maybe
> I should just shut up and stop rocking the boat; but I feel that
> y'all ought to know what you are likely to get.
MW: I think I fall somewhere in between the optimists and the pessimists
here. I believe there is soemthing useful to be done, but the difficulty and
scale of what has to be done are such that a timescale of decades rather
than years should be considered as likely before we will get anywhere
significant.
>
> Pat Hayes
>
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>
Regards
Matthew
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