Re: SUO: RE: More KIF-ified Ontology Content
Pat,
I think it would be very helpful to the SUO effort to post references
that you mentioned. Do you have paper citations for
1. Simon
2. Tarski
3. Hobbs
(I've already posted references to Casati and Varzi, Barry Smith and Cyc)
Adam
At 05:12 PM 12/5/2000 -0600, pat hayes wrote:
>>[Adam:]
>>Pat,
>> I think that you're arguing with a point that hasn't been asserted. I
>> don't think anyone would claim that the goal of the SUO is to create the
>> "One True Ontology". I would say that our goal is to create a "Good
>> Enough Ontology". There may be alternate ways to formalize concepts and
>> we should make reasonable engineering choices to pick one decent
>> solution and move forward.
>> I'd suggest that if we come up with a product that's reasonably general
>> and correct that we'll have a much better product than if we, on the one
>> hand, created a host of different and incompatible formalizations or, on
>> the other hand, spent eons searching for the one correct way to
>> formalize every representational issue.
>
>
>>>>[Chris Partridge:]
>>>>.....
>>>>This is a general point that I think and others have raised before. Unless
>>>>we get agreement on the high level structure (the ontological paradigm) and
>>>>this will involve hard choices then I do not see how we can expect to
>>>>amalgamate the lower level theories.
>
>Adam, thanks for the comment. However, I honestly cannot reconcile what
>you say with what Chris says. What is "the ontological paradigm" if it is
>not the One True Ontology? OK; never mind "True", thats a red herring. My
>point was that there isnt going to be (for the reasons which Chris
>outlined so cogently in his original message) one Good Enough Ontology, if
>'good enough' means that it will accomodate all ontological perspectives
>reasonably well. You seem to think that this is like choosing a standard
>notation, but it's more like taking a definite position on every deep
>question in philosophical analysis for the last two thousand years, and
>declaring that particular combination of philosophical perspectives to be
>'good enough' for everyone to use for any reasonable purpose. Why do you
>think that people have been arguing about this for so long, if they felt
>that one or another position was 'good enough'? You have probably hundreds
>of conceptual clashes in the KIF axiom files you already have gotten done.
>
>The ontological differences are very basic and very real, and they
>permeate all axiom-writing. Take time for example, and never mind all the
>various temporal ontologies (interval- or point-based, dense or discrete
>or continuous, etc.), but focus on a more wide-ranging issue: how do the
>basic entities of the (wider) ontology fit into time? Do the axioms refer
>to things which endure through time, and consider these a fundamentally
>different kind of entity than things which happen at a time? Do they
>assume that truths are asserted at a time (and hence are implicitly or
>explicitly tensed) or are the assertions themselves timeless, and asserted
>about temporally located things? When the properties of something change
>with time, does one indicate this by referring to the time at which they
>hold, or does one regard the relations and properties as holding of
>temporal 'slices' of the things, or does one refer to the changes
>explicitly? All of these questions (and others) need to be answered, and
>the answers one gives will have consequences throughout the SUO (one
>cannot keep this genie bottled up in a temporal ontology); and there are
>no right or wrong answers. You can do it either way, in all these cases.
>Some things are easier to say in some ways than others; some things are
>unsayable in some combinations of answers, but those combinations are
>recommended by weighty ontological authorities armed with truckloads of
>scholarship, so you are going to have some mighty battles ahead. (Guarino
>agrees with Aristotle that all events ultimately derive from enduring
>continuants; other living philosophers agree with Heraclitus that the
>primary mode of existence is flux, so things supervene on events. People
>will still be arguing about this two millenia from now. Practical folk use
>whichever viewpoint is handiest, but then they don't have to be logically
>consistent.) Whatever you decide, you had better get it done soon, as most
>of these files of axioms being produced will need to be entirely
>re-written, since every author writes axioms based on their own
>idiosyncratic answers to these (and other) questions, and their particular
>assumptions are built into their very way of thinking, and not made
>explicit, but are inconsistent with other author's implicit answers. (You
>have Barry Smith's boundaries ontology axioms. Are there temporal
>boundaries as well as spatial? Do boundaries endure, or would one describe
>this by saying that the temporally enduring thing has a spatiotemporal
>boundary? What kind of boundary is a moving weather front, behind which
>thunderstorms can be expected this afternoon?)
>
>Guarino's mereology isnt compatible with Simon's, and neither of them are
>compatible with Tarski (last time I looked), so y'all had better decide
>which you want to believe. Most of the mereological accounts of space do
>not allow things like lines, surfaces or points to occur in the domain of
>discourse, and rapidly generate inconsistencies if they are allowed in, so
>you had better not meet anyone who wants to talk about the length or shape
>of a boundary line. (Check the Cyc geography axioms pretty carefully, and
>be prepared to re-think them one at a time; and check out things like
>#$SheetLikeObject.) Holes require something like pieces of space in the
>ontology. Are they material or not? If you fill up a hole with water, is
>the hole full? (Since the only reasonable answer is 'yes and no', does
>this mean there are two notions of 'hole', or two notions of 'full'? How
>exactly do they differ?) Can one divide a hole in half? (Casati and Varsi
>say not, butif a hole is a piece of space you certainly can, eg consider
>the space occupied by the water in a flooded tunnel which is half-full of
>water.) These various differences arent the result of bugs or sloppiness:
>they reflect different ontological perspectives. (For example, Cyc doesnt
>make any firm distinction between a thing and the space it occupies,
>whereas most mereologies make a very sharp distinction.) There isnt going
>to be a single UO which allows them all to coexist, and if you try to take
>a bit from one and a bit from another you will just get incoherence and
>muddle. There isnt a single 'reasonably general and correct' ontology:
>there are many ontologies, all general and all with as valid a claim to be
>'reasonable and correct' as all the others, but sharply incompatible with
>each other. Some ambitious folk want their ontology to include a distinct
>entity for every fact that can be asserted in the language (Jerry Hobbs
>calls these 'eventualities'), which is going to be inconsistent with any
>SUO that anyone produces. So, in spite of your protests, you ARE going to
>have to decide on a one true ontology, or at any rate a one standard
>ontology; and if that word "standard" is going to have any real meaning,
>then it might as well be written "true", since obviously the point here is
>to say that you can have any ontological color as long as it's black.
>
>Best wishes
>
>Pat
>
>PS. [Actually an alternative strategy would be to explicitly include all
>the alternatives into the SUO, using some kind of 'context' mechanism,
>maybe (?) To be really useful however this would need to be more powerful
>than the 'micro-theory' notion used in Cyc, which is really only a
>namespace-management tool. You would want to have axioms relating the
>various notions of 'part' in different ontologies, or the various ways of
>referring to time and change, in the form of mappings between contexts. It
>would go way beyond SUO-KIF, for sure.]
>
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