SUO: RE: Re: Comment On Procedure
Jon,
. Thanks for that. I suspect you have spoken for many people's
experiences.
. One thing that left me without an ability to make anything
of some time ago, was when you said something that the reason I (I think it
was directed at me) should take your word for it because you were the sum
total of your experiences, and had been there and done that, etc.
. As with many people, I like to convince myself of things by
looking at the "evidence", and making up my own mind.
. I admit I am slowly making my way through John Sowa's paper
on "Mathematical background (as time permits), and am finding it most
useful. Perhaps then I will be able to follow some of your more advanced
arguments.
. In the meanwhile, I am hoping the SUO will be developed in a
way that maximises the readability to ordinary people able to grasp logical
thought processes without necessarily requiring a prior knowledge of
esoteric logic languages, or at least with the selected language explained
in simple terms most (ie. say 60%+) people can understand.
. That said, I firmly believe a practical ontology is
feasible, even if it needs some careful definition of how to handle some
inherent and (apparently) unavoidable internal inconsistencies arising out
of differing perspectives and so on.
. I forget whether it was you, but someone recently said that
they believed mathematics was an empirical science, rather than a logical
one. I tend to favour a middle-of-the-road path. Some of the principles were
empirically derived, but, some were then proven logically; and from there
yet other principles were logically derived. The point is that I see logic
as being inextricably related to mathematics, and suspect that the same path
applies, and that there will never be a single integrated and entirely
internally consistent ontology capable of handling all valid perspectives.
Cheers Graham Horn
National Data Standards Unit
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare
================================================
Phone: 02.6244.1094
Fax: 02.6244.1199
Email: Graham.Horn@aihw.gov.au <mailto:graham.horn@aihw.gov.au>
-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:jawbrey@oakland.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2001 1:36 AM
To: Horn, Graham
Cc: Stand Up Ontology
Subject: SUO: Re: Comment On Procedure
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Graham,
I was in the middle of replying to one of your other notes
when this one came in, so I will "fuse" my responses below.
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Graham Horn wrote:
>
> Jon,
>
> . Something between two extremes is occurring.
>
> * Either those of us continuing in this direction
> are blind to the problems you are foreseeing;
Different people have different experiences;
they learn different lessons from their experiences;
they get sensitive to different dangers from these lessons.
Perhaps a little bit of personal history will serve as an
explanation of "where I am coming from", as we used to say.
I am a true believer in the use of Logic -- that in itself
is no big deal, as I have been a true believer in just about
anything at one time or another -- but this is a mind-set that
has persisted for about as long as I can remember. I do not say
"Logic is F0L, and F0L is Logic, and that is all ye need to know",
because I do not think that we can avoid the need to quantify over
pre-designated sets of predicates, still, it's been so long since
I contemplated using the word "All" to range over anything other
than a "previously established harmonium of well-tempered tunes",
if you catch my riff, that it was only recently in this forum
that I had to be reminded that people might still interpret
me otherwise if I was not fastidious about qualifying it.
Being by nature a pragmatic thinker, I do at at least try to practice
all of the stuff that I prattle on about, and so, having attained the
age of at least a modicum of reason, that is, when I first set out on
my graduate studies in Mathematics, and again, when I took what I wit
that I had wot from these motley crews and tried to barter it for the
wages of it on the wine-dark seashores of AI, and CompSci, and verily
deep into the dark interior of that (not so) brave (not so) new world
of Psychology, well, even there, I remained the true defender of this,
my native, my all too naive faith in logic.
So what? So what happened was this.
> * Or we can see ways through the maze, over the
> hurdles, and of coping with the unforseen challenges;
I found myself in the middle of so many mazes and so many mires, out of
which
moribund mess of morasses, whether they bound me as bewildering
metaphormazes
or whether they struck me as fascinating meta-moirés, I could not see any
way
to continue the metamorphosis of myself into myself that I call a way of
life.
So, this time around, I made a concerted effort to get over
my childhood (disastrous) experiences with computers, and I
took another turn at the wheels of these machines to see if
they could help me build up the steam of consciousness that
it takes to extract myself from the matrices of mathematics.
Well, there are many episodes yet remaining for this harrowing tale --
I have only taken you as far as where I was living twenty years ago --
but let me sum up, for this interval, by saying that I have come by
my impression honestly, as everybody does, of course, of due course,
and just about everything that I have learned I have learned in the
hardest way possible -- I have always been rather dense in that way --
which is to say, by happening initially to think the exact opposite
of that which one is eventually forced, by dint of utter failure in
the chasing of one's initial tale, to come to entertain as the next
belief on the tree of hypotheses. In short, I have already paid my
dues to all of the cliches that I hear echoed here, and I have paid
them all of the heed that I ever will. There is a world elsewhere.
Have to take a break now,
Will finish up later on,
Jon Awbrey
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> * Or possibly a mixture.
>
> . We will use our knowledge, experience and human
> ingenuity to attempt with the problems as best we can.
>
> . We won't ignore any pertinent contributions you make,
> especially when they are in plain enough language for us
> to capture their meanings.
>
> Cheers Graham Horn
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Graham Horn wrote:
>
> John and Ian,
>
> . I strongly support Ian's approach. I believe it reflects
> what happened in the development, and subsequent formalisation,
> of traditional language vocabulary and grammar structures over
> thousands of years. I suggest it is thereby demonstrably practical.
>
> . In addition, I would suggest that an important benefit we get
> in his approach is that, in solving problems and inconsistencies
> that arise in our project, we can draw on those millennia of
> experience of developing traditional language structures.
>
> . I am particularly taken by the force of Ian's statement that:
> "... the top-down approach to ontology design, has been tried,
> and, as you know, it comprises the metaphysical component of
> the 2,500 year history of western philosophy. Unfortunately,
> this approach has not netted us any real conclusions. It has
> given us a nice KR language, the first-order predicate calculus,
> but it has not yielded any content which a majority of philosophers
> could agree on."
>
> Cheers Graham Horn
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