RE: SUO: RE: Re: More KIF-ified Ontology Content
Pat,
In the section - copied below - you suggest that the occurent/continuant
distinction cannot be accommodated in the 4-D view. As you are certainly
aware, if you start looking into this, things get even more murky.
For example, it seems to me that this is because the 4-D view usually
includes a kind of materialism (or extensionalism) - i.e. that the 4-D
extension of object is the object (and so the 4-D extension is a principle
of identity). One can (and I seem to recall some papers on this point) take
the non-standard view that the 4-D extension is an attribute/property of the
object, then you can maintain the distinction - but lose the principle of
identity. In this case, two things (of different types - following Locke)
can occupy the same 4-D space-time.
It does seem that language has this distinction - and so for modeling
language it may be useful. What is less clear to me, is whether the
distinction is practically useful when dealing with things outside
ourselves. When would a process engineer working on oil rigs - or a
biologist classifying animals make use of this distinction. In my analysis,
I have not come across any examples of this. For me, this seems to indicate
that for types of system that deal with oil rigs (and biological
classifications), this might be a useful revision (ontological reduction).
If you have some examples, I would be interested.
Regards,
Chris
<snip>......
> > 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.
I'll try again. The point is that in the continuant/occurent
framework, there is a conceptual distinction between a person (for
example) and that same person's history. The second is something
which is extended through time, and has earlier and later parts: it
can be naturally mapped into the 4-d ontology; it is what I called a
'history' in my naive physics papers and what Fritz Lehmann calls a
'worm'. The first, however, simply cannot be described in the 4-d
ontology. It is something which only exists at a time (like a
temporal slice through a history) but which is the same thing from
one time to the next (unlike a temporal slice through a history). You
will indeed have trouble imagining this if you insist on thinking of
things in the 4-dimensional framework, since it is impossible in that
framework. Nevertheless it seems to be useful notion, and one that
corresponds to a common distinction in natural language and in
ordinary reasoning. We commonly think of ourselves as being the same
person we were yesterday (though with different properties) and
simultaneously think of ourselves as wholly present at any given
instant.
One can draw different conclusions from this idea. One possible
conclusion is that the 4-d ontology is perfect and that this notion
is therefore incoherent; another, I think more reasonable, conclusion
is that this concept has its uses, but only in a fundamentally
different ontological framework than the 4-d one. From which it
follows that the 4-d ontological framework is not in fact the
'universal' framework that you seem to think it is.
(One way to make the distinction is to think of two kinds of history:
one kind 'breaks up' into pieces along time-like boundaries, the
other along space-like boundaries. The problem now for the 4-d
ontology is that two of these can occupy exactly the same region of
space-time, yet be conceptually distinct. Maybe your 4-d ontology can
handle this: my one couldn't.)