SUO: RE: More KIF-ified Ontology Content
Pat,
I'm happy with those suggestions:
>>Pat maintains that "a Tarski-style model" is or should be...
>
>No; COULD be. I hope that isnt a provocation to war. My claim is
>that the theory is entirely agnostic as to the nature of the things
>in the sets.
>With the understanding that 'concrete models' includes 'abstract
>models' as a special case, this would be fine. Apart from that
>quibble, I entirely concur.
To summarize the agreement,
1. The term "model" won't make any commitment about the nature
of the base entities: they could be abstract things like
surrogates or pointers, or they could be actual physical
entities (whatever one might think the physical world
happens to be made up of).
2. The word "table" can be used as a synonym for "extension
of a relation" as long as we agree that tables could be
generalized to infinitely many (even uncountably infinite)
tuples of entities (which may themselves be pointers,
surrogates, names, or even "physical things", if need be).
3. If a model is entirely made up of abstract, mathematical
entities, it could be called an "abstract model" to make
it clear that there are no physical things in it.
By the way, many people in database land make a distinction
between "lexical object types" (LOTs) and "nonlexical object
types" (NOLOTs). LOTs are entities like character strings,
numbers, and pointers, and NOLOTs are things like cats, dogs,
trees, people, houses, etc. This illustrates the typical IT
perspective that makes physical things secondary to the kinds
of things that are represented in computers.
I have no objection to making such distinctions, as long as
the basic assumptions are stated clearly up front.
John