RE: SUO: RE: A proposed SUO content outline - roles
Chris P. wrote:
> In a 4-D ontology.....
That prepositional phrase strikes at the core of some of the
confusions that have obscured many of the discussions over the
past several months.
I would claim that the terms "4-D" and "3-D" are inappropriate
modifiers of the noun "ontology". I would say that they are
coordinate systems that can be used to describe whatever
entities one might decide exist in an ontology. But the
coordinate system, by itself, can never change something's
status from "existing" to "nonexisting" or vice-versa.
I would agree that a 4-D coordinate system has certain
advantages for describing some features of the world,
and a 3-D coordinate system has other advantages for
describing other features. But if there is anything that
appears in one coordinate system that has no correlate
whatever in the other, then that thing is an artifact of
the notation, and not something fundamental in the world.
To clarify what I mean by a coordinate system, I would go
back to the examples of the Lagrangian and Eulerian coordinate
systems for fluid mechanics. One of them describes a fluid
by looking at what flows past a given point, and the other
describes a fluid by looking where a given drop (or other
miniscule part of it) happens to go over time. Different
features become easier to describe in one system than the
other, but both of them are equally fundamental. There is
no feature of the actual fluid that completely escapes notice
in either coordinate system.
I would maintain that the same is true of the 3-D and 4-D
(or any other) coordinate system. They are all equally
fundamental (or conversely equally arbitrary). What is real
is not what is expressed in one or the other, but what is
common to all of them.
I am nonpartisan when it comes to coordinate systems.
Any or all of them may be useful for different purposes at
different times, and it is a mistake to consider any one of
them as somehow more "fundamental" or "privileged" for the
purpose of doing ontology.
John Sowa