Re[2]: SUO: More KIF-ified Ontology Content
Dear John, Pat and Matthew .
Suppose your discussion around the 4D approach is not too principle .
The both approaches can coexist "in peace" if implemented to principle different types of
objects . Some examples . When working with Oracle HR we use their "date tracked" objects .
Such for example personID is not unique and primary key for it is PersonID+DateFrom+DateTo .
There are no problems with history description for date tracked objects with different
properties in different periods of time and there are no problems to identify
the same person . The like situation is with the "fixed essets" objects. But the situation
is much more complex with the "nonmaterial essets" - software for example .
Such it is a hard work to support a consistency between different versions
and the "patches" inside) in DBMS, development tools , an application software etc.
Suppose it is a challenge for IT community. For such types of objects may be it will
be more suitable to use the 4D approach . From the biosemiotic point of view -
http://www.ento.vt.edu/~sharov/biosem/txt/biosem.html such difference is natural
because of the two types of objects belong to "macro level" and to "micro level" .
See also http://ltsc.ieee.org/logs/suo/msg01123.html .
Leonid
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Friday, December 22, 2000, 11:51:44 AM, you wrote:
JFS> Matthew and Pat,
JFS> I believe that you have both made some very important points.
JFS> Rather than criticizing the ideas I don't fully agree with,
JFS> I will comment on some that I like very much.
JFS> Then I'll present my preferred way of viewing things, which
JFS> allows for multiple viewpoints to coexist (even when they
JFS> couldn't be simultaneously asserted without contradiction).
>>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.
JFS> This is a very clear statement of a position, which I agree
JFS> with, but which is more often expressed in a more muddled way,
JFS> which I don't agree with. The simpler, more muddled, and
JFS> to my mind, more dangerous way is the following:
JFS> It is easier for people to agree on the lower-level
JFS> concepts than on the higher-level ones. Therefore,
JFS> the high-level concepts aren't important, and it doesn't
JFS> matter if we haven't done a good job on the top levels.
JFS> The point where I stop agreeing in such an enthusiastic way
JFS> is at the next sentence:
>>MW: I would further expect
>>to be able to translate between the different frameworks.
JFS> Pat has stated my concerns very nicely:
>>PH: 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.
JFS> I also like Pat's succinct summary of an important distinction,
JFS> which I use as one of the top three in my top-level ontology:
>>PH: 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).
JFS> And this is a good summary of the problem:
>>PH: 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 histories 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.
JFS> To summarize:
JFS> 1. Pat says that the 4-D viewpoint allows ways of cutting up
JFS> the universe that cannot be mapped into the viewpoint of
JFS> 3-D plus time.
JFS> 2. Matthew points out that it is easier to map the 3-D plus
JFS> time viewpoint into the 4-D viewpoint.
JFS> I agree with both, but only with the caveat that "easier" does
JFS> not imply "possible to translate each and every distinction
JFS> that anyone would ever want to make."
>>>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
JFS> an
>>>association is a relationship that understands that it lasts for a period
JFS> 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
JFS> in
>>>the new model, and vice-versa.
JFS> But Pat points out the problem some distinctions vanish in
JFS> the 4-D ontology, and I agree:
>>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.
JFS> I also agree very strongly with the following:
>>PH: 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.
JFS> I agree with Matthew's last sentence, but not the first one:
>>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.
JFS> There may be very good reasons for using incompatible
JFS> representations even when a single unified one is understood,
JFS> as Pat explained with his example of quantum electrodynamics.
JFS> I also believe that there are a very large number of other
JFS> examples that one could use, as I tried to explain in the
JFS> Knowledge Soup chapter of my KR book.
JFS> Although I agree with a great deal of what Pat says,
JFS> I would quibble with the following:
>>PH: 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.
JFS> On the contrary, quantum electrodynamics is a single coherent
JFS> conceptualization, and it is possible (at least in principle)
JFS> to use it to solve problems without breaking it apart in
JFS> incompatible ways. Unfortunately, for most practical
JFS> problems, QED is so computationally difficult that
JFS> different (and incompatible) simplifications are necessary
JFS> to get useful results in an acceptable amount of time.
JFS> I strongly agree with Pat's point:
>>PH: 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.
JFS> But I still believe that there is something useful that we can
JFS> accomplish even before science stops. My best cut at what
JFS> that may be is summarized in the Knowledge Soup chapter of
JFS> my KR book. Summarizing even more briefly,
JFS> 1. An open-ended lattice of theories, which could be extended
JFS> arbitrarily far to accommodate any possible way of
JFS> conceptualizing the world in any finite set of concepts.
JFS> A complete lattice would have to be infinite, but any
JFS> particular version that might be implemented at any one
JFS> time is finite. However, there is no restriction on what
JFS> anyone might add to it, given enough time, effort, and
JFS> ingenuity.
JFS> 2. Methods for navigating the lattice to find theories that
JFS> are approximately true or "good enough" for many problems,
JFS> and with methods for revising and extending theories to
JFS> make them better adapted to solving new problems.
JFS> For more about the lattice of theories, see Section 6 of my
JFS> paper on processes and causality:
JFS> http://www.bestweb.net/~sowa/ontology/causal.htm
JFS> And by the way, I believe that causality is a very important
JFS> concept that is central to a large number of issues in the SUO.
JFS> But that is another topic.
JFS> John Sowa
Best regards,
Leonid mailto:leo@mmk.ru