RE: SUO: RE: Re: More KIF-ified Ontology Content
> >
> > >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.
Yes, I meant the term 'heirarchies' to include multiple inheritance structures.
> >
> > 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).
Obviously the interesting case is where they are referring to
different concepts. But the difficult case is where A's concept
cannot even be expressed in B's overall ontological framework, and
vice versa.
>MW: Having said that I would be quite interested in what you thought was the
>difference between a continuant and a space-time history.
It took me a while to follow this myself, having been used to
thinking in a 4-d way for about 20 years now. The distinction (which
I learned from Peter Simons) is roughly as follows. In the
continuant/occurent way of thinking, one refers to existence *at a
time*. This means that the four-dimensional entities simply do not
exist in this ontology. A continuant is something which continues to
exist through time and retains its identity through time, and is such
that (this is the characterising property) all its parts are present
whenever it is present. Thus a person is a continuant, since if I am
here then all my parts are here (now), while a race, say, is not a
continuant - it is in fact an occurrent - since it has parts which
are temporally distinguished: it has a beginning, a middle and an
end. The distinction is like that between a person (a continuant) and
that person's life (an occurrent).
Both occurrents and continuants 'map' into 4-d entities in the 4-d
histories ontology, but there is no principled way there to
distinguish them. The nearest you can get is to say that continuants
have isotemporal parts while occurents have isospatial parts, but in
the 4-d histries ontology one can cut 'parts' any way one chooses,
including along boundaries which slant in time (ie which are
'moving', as someone who thinks non-4-dimensionally would say.) And
the defining criteria for the distinction in the other ontology is
literally incoherent in the 4-d ontology, since *nothing* is such
that all its parts are present whenever it is present: the 'whenever'
here is meaningless in the 4d ontology.
As evidence for the idea of a continuant in intuitive thinking,
consider the claim that I am the same person I was 10 years ago. This
is literally false in the 4-d ontology (it can be expressed there by
saying that me-now and me-1990 are both slices of the me-history, but
that raises the question of what distinguishes one history from
another, since these are also both slices of completely unrelated
histories) Statements like this seem to depend on the idea of
something retaining its identity through time, even though its
properties may change. This 'locus of identity' is what constitutes
the basic idea of a continuant, I think.
>
> > 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.
I wonder if you really can do this, if you think hard about it. Ive
been living within a 4-d ontology for a long time and mapping other
ontologies to it, and what I find is that many distinctions simply
vanish, rather than being 'translated'. This is fine with me, of
course, but it tends to get the other folk a little upset, especially
when they have written entire books about these distinctions. And in
the other direction, I find that perfectly reasonable-seeming things
in my ontology, like 'moving' (sloping in space/time) boundaries,
simply cannot be admitted into the other ontologies without producing
unacceptable confusions.
>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.
And are you SURE there is nothing that you could represent before
that you can no longer represent?
>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,
Oh come, come, this is impossibly naive for someone of this century.
As a matter of fact, in the best story about the world that the human
race has so far managed to produce, viz. quantum electrodynamics, the
world around us IS incompatible with itself, in that we have to use
two incompatible ways of conceptualizing it in order to fully
describe it. There is no single underlying theory of the world, and
some of the best minds who have thought about the matter during the
last century have concluded that there is no way to produce one. If
anything, the world gets more and more mysterious rather than more
and more coherent; and if there is a single coherent account, it
certainly will not bear the remotest similarity to any 'common-sense'
ontology of things, events and so on. The basic material of the
universe in QED seems to be a field which when multiplied by itself
becomes a kind of spatially located probability. If you know what the
square root of an information density is, then maybe you can produce
an acceptable world-ontology; but the very basic SUO distinctions -
between material and immaterial, for example - were rendered obsolete
by physics over a century ago. A pure vacuum has an intrinsic energy
and hence a nontrivial mass, for example. Things with mass have no
well-defined position in space, and so on.
>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.
But this 'area' seems to encompass all of science, from particle
physics to cosmology and everything in between.
> >
> > 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).
Yes. I think that you believe that there is a single, universally
acceptable, ontology, and that all others can be mapped into it. I
think this will happen only when science stops, and as I dont think
that will ever happen, I dont share your optimism about the Universal
Ontology (not Upper, notice!)
Pat
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