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 hierarchies, 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 'hierarchies' 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 I've 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 catalogue 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: Surely if this is the case then the concepts are disjoint, and the
concepts for which this is the case can be ignored as out of scope of the
other ontology. Of course this argument does not apply if the ontology is
supposed to be an ontology of everything. In this case, not being able to
express another ontology means that you have not succeeded yet, and you have
some work to do, which may include changing your view of the world (as has
happened to me).
>
> >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,
MW: There are two key questions to ask when you are mapping into a different
ontology:
1. What sort(s) of thing is this in the ontology I am mapping into?
2. How do I distinguish the objects in the ontology I am mapping into that
map back into my source ontology?
You seem to have answered the first of these here, and good go at the
second.
> but in
> the 4-d histories ontology one can cut 'parts' any way one chooses,
> including along boundaries which slant in time (i.e. which are
> 'moving', as someone who thinks non-4-dimensionally would say.)
MW: Quite, this is part of what makes it so powerful.
> 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.
MW: You lost me here. This sentence does not seem to follow from anything.
>
> 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.
MW: You seem to be very concerned about how concepts are expressed. I have a
simpler test as to whether two concepts match - do they refer to the same
thing (or can I infer that they refer to the same thing). So for example, in
the case of continuants and life histories, I can conclude either that a
continuant is the same as a life-history, or at least that they are
equivalent, i.e. for any life-history I have a continuant, and vice-versa
(there may be some additional objects involved on both sides).
>
> >
> > > 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. I've
> 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.
MW: Let me take this in two parts. I agree that many distinctions from other
world viewpoints disappear in a 4-D ontology. On the other hand I find that
you can recover the concepts of other ontologies from a 4-D ontology, though
you need to provide the definition of how to do this for your "other"
ontology so that you can do the mapping.
MW: On the other hand, as you find, I do not find the reverse is true. There
are things that can be expressed in a 4-D ontology, that cannot, as you say,
be translated into other ontologies. This simply means that a 4-D ontology
is more capable than the others. This just makes it sensible to choose a 4-D
ontology to be your underlying ontology which you use as a hub to translate
others to and from.
>
> >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: In practice yes, strictly no. In the previous ontology there were some
things you could say that did not make sense (we didn't bother to eliminate
them with axioms) but there isn't anything valid that we can't represent
(though of course it will be represented differently).
>
> >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.
MW: My point is though that these are just theories, not the world itself. I
will claim that these theories are inadequate for some circumstances, and
physicists will agree with me.
> 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.
MW: Allow me to bring you up to date. During the last 30 years or so
something called string theory has been developed which does things like
bring relativity and quantum theory together, explain why light can behave
like a wave and a particle, and help to explain the very early universe. I
recommend the popular science book "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene,
one of the developers of the theory.
MW: So I will argue that you are the one who is naive if you think that the
universe could exist if it was not self consistent, even if we do not
understand it.
> 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.
MW: Again I am not that concerned. In engineering, we are happy to rely on
Newtonian physics, even for getting to the moon, so whilst deeper ontologies
are useful for the way they can unify apparently correct but conflicting
ontologies, I expect that we will continue to use our common sense
ontologies on a day to day basis.
>
> >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.
MW: Yes, and interestingly this is just what String Theory covers.
>
> > >
> > > 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!)
MW: I think our position is much the same as science. There are a number of
ontologies (theories) some of which can be explained by others. There
probably isn't yet an ontology that explains everything, though I believe
the search for one is worthwhile (just as long as you don't expect to
discover it tomorrow). I also believe that much of our current ontologies
will remain useful. One of the main things we will gain from a (more)
universal ontology is an understanding of the limits to the ones we use
currently, rather than that we would stop using them.
>
> Pat
>
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Regards
Matthew
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