SUO: RE: Re: Proposed SUO Content Outline
Dear Jon,
This is one of the places where I came in.
> Exercise for the Reader:
>
> Try to imagine that -- just fora while -- we leave off trying
> to decide the "one right way", as Goethe put it, and just try
> to describe the current situation as it is, I mean, the state
> of affairs in which everyone has his or her or its pet theory
> of the world, and just try to muse about what it would demand,
> what kind of language would it require to represent this very
> sort of situation? This is just the "Dream of Leibniz" (DOL),
> deja vu all over again, but still, you have to ask yourself:
> "Why are we still so vastly far from its actual realization?"
> "Why do I have to ask myself that!?", you ask? It is a part
> of the exercise. You may, as always, choose not (not choose?)
> to accept the assignment. That's an axiom for all it's worth.
My answers to this question are in the IIDEAS architecture
(Integration of Industrial Data for Exchange Access and Sharing)
which can be found at:
http://iso18876.org/
The nub is to allow everyone to have it their way. The cost is the
interfacing between them. When the number of viewpoints is large, it
becomes more efficient to seek an "integration model" or ontology that
the others can be translated into and out of. It isn't important for this
ontology to be a viewpoint that anyone wants to use. It is important that it
is accurate and precise, and that other world views can map in and out.
This is why I prefer a 4D ontology. Not the one true way, but the crossroads
for
all ways. This may be optimistic, so I will settle for something that most
things
can map into most of the time.
Regards
Matthew
=============================================
Matthew West
Operations & Asset Management
Shell Services International
H3229, Shell Centre, London, SE1 7NA, UK.
Tel: +44 207 934 4490 Fax: 7929
Mobile: +44 7796 336538
E-mail: Matthew.R.West@is.shell.com
http://www.shellservices.com/
http://homepages.rya-online.net/matthew-west
=============================================
Also:
Shell Visiting Professor
The Keyworth Institute
The University of Leeds
=============================================
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:jawbrey@oakland.edu]
> Sent: 01 March 2001 15:11
> To: Frederick N Chase
> Cc: Arisbe; SemioCom; Stand Up Ontology
> Subject: SUO: Re: Proposed SUO Content Outline
>
>
>
> ¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤
>
> Fred,
>
> I extend my reply to your note of a couple of days ago.
>
> ¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~RECITATIVE~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤
>
> Fred Chase wrote:
> >
> > Thank you, Jon and Chris, for working with my posting.
> >
> > Below I'm expanding a little on what I said, in light
> > of your comments. (And no doubt further exposing the
> > unevenness in my understanding of our subject.)
> >
> > I was trying to further affirm the notion that, distasteful and
> > complexifying though it may be, it will be essential for us to
> > provide a place for theories, causal bubbles, axiomatizations,
> > alternative courses, views, domains of interest (DOIs), viewpoints,
> > or whatever they be termed which offer some sort of isolation one
> > from another. (I recognize that some of these may be fundamentally
> > different from others.)
>
> "Point of View" (POV) was always good enough for me --
> I will just leave Bobby McGee to speak for her self --
> Perhaps you missed all my onetime sloganizing about:
>
> "What is the geometry of the space whose points are views?"
>
> Some how the image of a lead zeppelin comes to mind.
> But here are some of the languishing links, any how:
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
>
> I am wondering if it is possible to embody our ontologies
> within a conceptual framework in which, just for starters,
> the maximal number of the following sorts of relationships
> among interpretive options and ontological/conceptual terms
> are permitted and supported by the system:
>
> <Option 1> : "activity" -<- "process"
> <Option 2> : "process" -<- "activity"
>
> <Option A> : "activity" -<- "activity class"
> <Option B> : "activity occurrence" -<- "activity"
>
> By "maximal number" I mean that each agent, interpreter, user,
> or whatever is constrained only by the requirement of logical
> consistency among his/her/its choices.
>
> I think that something like this, at least, will be required
> if we want to realize that old dream of Leibniz that started
> this business -- to devise a common medium for resolving our
> disputes and our misunderstandings through a computationally
> effective means.
>
> Anyway, that's what I rechnen.
>
> http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg00728.html
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
>
> The theme running through the last two subsections, that associates
> different interpreters and different aspects of interpretation with
> different kinds of relational structures on the same set of points,
> heralds a topic that will be developed extensively in the sequel.
>
> http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg00729.html
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
>
> I would like to follow up on the earlier remarks
> that I made along the general lines of this thread:
>
> [Quote First Note]
>
> Now, I know that this seems like a hopeless task, bound to lead
> to all sorts of confusion, but I think that most of us already
> function in the midst of a similar chaos, and yet, over time,
> we do learn to sort it out reasonably enough, more or less,
> and so there is hope that we can devise similar capacities
> in formal terms and even implement them in computer media.
>
> For example, I refer you to the cases of the "sign relations"
> A and B that I outlined at the outset of the "Sign Relations"
> thread. Rudimentary as it is, this is a germinal example of
> a very important property of certain linguistic expressions,
> one that is exhibited by all "natural languages" that I ever
> heard tell of, and one that is very relevant to our present
> circumstances. This is the "interpreter-indexing" (I-I)
> property of certain signs, expressions, texts, theories,
> corpi, oeuvres, works, lives, or whatever, where one has
> to know who's talking in order to know what's being said.
>
> Thus, we commonly have situations like this:
>
> A : "i" = "A"
> A : "u" = "B"
>
> B : "i" = "B"
> B : "u" = "A"
>
> And yet, short of being caught between the bases
> of a "who's on first" routine, people seldom get
> confused at all by all of this I-I business.
>
> It is in respect of this I-I property that we can expect
> each particular person that is participating in the activity
> of a discussion to maintain a sensible "point of view" (POV),
> as critiqued internally, without requiring everyone to speak
> the same "languange" (even within the same natural language),
> or even to share the same conceptual/syntactic framework.
>
> So, the Big Questions are:
>
> 1. How do we manage to do this, and can we teach it to a rock?
> 2. What is the geometry of this space, whose points are views?
>
> [ A glossy etymology on the theme of a rock:
> | 'silicon' <- Latin: 'silex' = flint, quartz, pebble; akin to
> | 'shell' <- Greek: 'skallein' to hoe, to rake, to scrape;
> | 'Scylla'? -- Nah, now I'm just guessing ...
> ]
>
> Happy Peirce's Birthday, Everybody! [September 10]
>
> http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg00731.html
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
>
> I am still in the process of trying to figure out
> what Adam's view on "higher-arity relations" is,
> and so I will reserve my comments on that until
> such time as I come to understand what it is.
>
> I had thought that my analogy with different
> numeral systems for the same set of numbers
> was pretty apt -- or so I reckoned at the
> time. I am at a loss what to say next,
> so I will wait for furher information.
>
> Just as a hypothesis -- you understand --
> I am beginning to think that I detect a slight
> difference in attitude toward notational systems,
> representational frameworks, and syntax in general.
>
> For me, when the syntax gets in the way
> of thinking clearly about the objects,
> then the syntax has to change.
>
> I used to be a fan of frame'n'slot systems
> back in the days when I could recognize them
> as revivals of some really good ideas from
> both Frege and Peirce -- anything that these
> two could agree on has just gotta be Good! --
> namely Frege's "poly-unsaturated sentences"
> and Peirce's "rhemes or rhemata". However,
> the ways these representations have fallen
> into lately I just no longer see much trace
> of the originally good ideas left in them.
>
> Some of the earliest projects that led me into AI
> had to do with finding default fillers for frames --
> but the many years that I spent on this led me into
> other approaches, other directions, other solutions.
>
> From my present point of view, one of the chief and
> the most adverse factors that just keeps on killing
> "artificial intelligence based on logic" (AIBOL) is
> the "circumstantial and inescapable nuisance" (CAIN)
> of the fact that the real world just has to keep on
> changing, and, partly as a consequence, that agents
> of interpretation just have to keep on enterprising
> to view it from many diverse perspectives. Hence,
> the main theme of the work that marked my transition
> into Systems Engineering, "the problem of dealing with
> change and diversity in logic-based intelligent systems".
>
> Having spent the last decade or so working to resurrect AIBOL
> from that early grave, the one to which the "frame-problem" --
> no relation, or is it? -- seemed to have consigned it long ago,
> and, incidentally, having seen the necessity of working out the
> form of this geometry whose points are views, I feel that I have
> learned one or two things in the meantime, if nothing else, about
> a host of approaches that I have tried before and found wanting.
>
> I will not pass that way again,
>
> End of Lecture (EOL),
>
> http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg01541.html
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
>
> Was sind und was sollen die "TWEAKSen"?
>
> I did not like the sound of my own ceration, at least, not at
> at first,
> so much sibilance at the starts and the suffixes of the
> sounds to suffer,
> but I am beginning to get used it, bit by bit, and pershap
> there is even
> some sort of subconscious sophistication that is being
> insinuated within
> the aspect of its circumstantial declension, that is to say,
> a case for
> its inflection that makes even the sense of its singular sound plural.
>
> Still, I had some further reservations. I confess to being
> just a little
> bit suspicious of any story that invokes the "elements", as
> if by way of
> some pathetic fallacy, to shore up its caissons for what must
> be, in any
> case, already underwater when it sets to its "work on
> foundations" (WOF).
> But then I remembered that a topology is just a collection of
> sets that
> are called "open" by stipulation -- or "shut", if you force
> the case --
> and so this interval of reflection has restored my equanimity
> about it.
>
> And yes, I will go with this e-notion,
> And let the chips fall where they may,
> For prolonging that inevitable schism
> May yet be the dedekindest cut of all.
>
> Up until now, I have been accustomed to asking this question
> in the form:
>
> "What is the geometry of those spaces whose points are views?"
>
> But geometry is so earthbound that it conveys a distorted impression,
> and the overwhelming gravity of the euclidean catechism --
> that all of us
> suffered, in our most formative years, to have dinned into
> our suppleness --
> well, it impedes the subtle "form of levity" (FOL) and the
> demi-urgent EMF
> that we need to get off our axioms, and to leave the ground,
> which means to
> loose the surly bonds that bind us to our seeming need for
> ceratin grounds.
>
> Exercise for the Reader:
>
> Try to imagine that -- just fora while -- we leave off trying
> to decide the "one right way", as Goethe put it, and just try
> to describe the current situation as it is, I mean, the state
> of affairs in which everyone has his or her or its pet theory
> of the world, and just try to muse about what it would demand,
> what kind of language would it require to represent this very
> sort of situation? This is just the "Dream of Leibniz" (DOL),
> deja vu all over again, but still, you have to ask yourself:
> "Why are we still so vastly far from its actual realization?"
> "Why do I have to ask myself that!?", you ask? It is a part
> of the exercise. You may, as always, choose not (not choose?)
> to accept the assignment. That's an axiom for all it's worth.
>
> But I would not disavow all knowledge of your actions,
> that is, if I were you.
>
> More, Later,
>
> Jon Awbrey
>
> Incidental Musings:
>
> [ ceration?
> | cerate = an unctious preparation.
> | L: ceratum = wax salve; cera = wax.
> ]
>
> http://www-math.sci.kun.nl/math/werkgroepen/gmfw/bronnen/dedek
> ind1.html
> http://www.thoralf.uwaterloo.ca/htdocs/scav/dedek/dedek.html
>
> http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg01873.html
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
>
> Questions that have arisen lately, on the themes of development,
> differentiation, and diversity among our ontologies, not to mention
> disagreement, dispersion, and discord among our perspectives on them,
> lead me to replay this note that I sent to John Sowa early
> last summer,
> thematizing an approach that I have been endeavoring to
> develop, a little
> something that I like to think of as "analytic differential
> ontology" (ADO).
>
> > Subject: Ontology & Process
> > Date: Sun, 04 Jun 2000 14:30:33 -0400
> > From: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
> > To: John F Sowa <sowa@bestweb.net>
> >
> > #%%THIS%%%#%%%IS%%%%#%%%NOT%%%#%%%%A%%%%#%%FRAME%%#
> >
> > To John Sowa:
> >
> > Recent mentions of "process ontology" on the CG-list
> > have brought me back to related questions that I have
> > been working on for some time, from a slightly different
> > perspective, perhaps. I am concerned with the questions
> > of "difference in ontology", or "differential ontology",
> > including as special studies the issues of diversity and
> > change in the ontologies that different observers adopt.
> > Some of these questions are:
> >
> > Is there a reasonable framework or a language for talking
> > about "the geometry of the space whose points are views",
> > including the working ontologies that go with each and
> > every observer's/interpreter's "point of view" (POV)?
> >
> > Can we put the "chiasmatic commutator" to work on the
> > issue of process ontology -- turning the question around,
> > from asking about the "ontology of process" to asking about
> > the "process of ontology" -- that is, asking what sorts of laws,
> > if any, govern the dynamics of change in people's ontologies,
> > in other words, in the conceptual frameworks that people use
> > to posit their various ontological hierarchies?
> >
> > My personal approach to these sorts of questions, since the
> > complexities of the overlaid and shifting meta-perspectives
> > are enough to overwhelm a person at first, has been to stake
> > out an initial base camp at that simplest level of ontology
> > and conceptual framework that I can imagine, without being
> > completely trivial, the world of "zeroth order logic",
> > propositional calculus, truth table semantics, venn diagrams,
> > in short, the "alpha" part of Peirce's Existential Graphs.
> >
> > This has certainly been a big enough bite to chew on for a while,
> > given the difficulties of the NP-complete satisfiability problems
> > that arise, but I have been able to devise an efficient and powerful
> > enough extension of Peirce's basic syntax, along with a
> workable enough
> > implementation of basic computational tools for using this
> representation,
> > that I have been able to begin contemplating the
> "differential extension"
> > of propositional calculus -- in fact, one of the surprises
> of the whole
> > development is that not a few of Peirce's original ideas
> almost seemed
> > to demand this sort of extension.
> >
> > [ Note: I think that the most general name for this in mathematics
> > | is the "De Rham Extension", and I have begun to look into this,
> > | but it is really just what you do when you add differential forms
> > | to analytic geometry. All in all, I am just exploiting
> the analogy
> > | betweeen Propositional Calculus, as a study of functions B^n -> B,
> > | and Real Analysis, as a study of functions R^n -> R, and asking:
> > | What is the proper form of differential and integral calculus that
> > | goes with Prop Calc (Sentential Logic)?
> > ]
> >
> > I guess I could be taken as posing the thesis here that one way to
> > approach the problem of talking about change and diversity in these
> > logical, ontological, or qualitative realms might just be
> to start by
> > looking at what worked in the more quantitative domains of
> analysis and
> > physics. Of course, it is not likely that everything will
> turn out to be
> > exactly the same, and one must be willing to tolerate a
> number of surprises.
> >
> > #%%%%%%%%%#%%%%%%%%%#%%%%%%%%%#%%%%%%Jon#Awbrey%%%#
>
> http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg00072.html
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
>
> I could go on, and on, but then, you already knew that about me.
>
> > The kinds of DOIs I had in mind include the following examples,
> > though I'm not sure all all of these are suitable for an IEEE SUO,
> > or for a chunk that can be merged into an IEEE SUO.
> >
> > 1a. The Euclid/Hilbert geometry including the
> > uniqueness-of-parallels postulate.
> >
> > 2b. The Bolayi/Lobachevsky/Hilbert geometry which
> > postulates that through a point not on a line,
> > there is more than one line parallel to that line.
>
> These are good catalysts for inspiring analogical thinking,
> much in the way that I take projective geometry as a basis
> for my own thinking about "theory as point of view" (TAPOV),
> but if you take the geometry literally then all of it is
> pretty well-worked-over, with a favorite way of proving
> relative consistency being to construct a model of each
> geometry inside each of the others, and so on. Still,
> all of this classical gas can be extremely suggestive.
>
> > Of interest here is that these DOIs
> > are variants with a large common corpus,
> > including
> >
> > | For any two different points,
> > | there is exactly one line
> > | containing these points.
>
> You have probably observed, that when it comes to points of view,
> an unlimited number of lines can be spun between any two of them.
>
> > It probably isn't a good idea to
> >
> > a) use a slew of separate ontology terms
> > to create two versions of the elements
> > of this common corpus nor to
> >
> > b) use a quantifier on all of the common corpus.
> >
> > 2a. The law of the conservation of momentum in an
> > inertial (non-accelerated) frame of reference.
> >
> > 2b. The lack of conervation of momentum stated with
> > respect to a non-inertial frame of reference.
>
> Again, physics is a prolific source of many suggestive analogies --
> we can get a lot of mileage by cranking the chiasmatic commutator
> or the exchange relation between the "Theory of Dynamics" (T(D))
> and the "Dynamics of Theory" (D(T)), and this is precisely why
> I have been pursuing these very figures of speech so doggedly
> in my "Differential Logic & Dynamic Systems" work.
>
> ¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~EVITATICER~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤
>
> ¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~ESTENUATIO~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤
>
> > 3a. The current-but-classical biological/organism hierarchy
> > of Kingdom/Phylim/Class/Order/Family/Genus/Species.
> >
> > 3b. A putative competing DOI based on genetic "distance".
> >
> > For example, it may be that, in a genetic DOI,
> > the notion that a Fish is a Gilled, Finned,
> > lives-in-the-water subclass of cold-blooded
> > vertebrates will need to be modified.
> >
> > 4a. One reality.
> >
> > 4b. An alternative reality.
> >
> > I was not suggesting that paraconsistent logic or
> > probabilistic reasoning or non-demonstrative forms
> > of inference be used. (I've not read about them.)
>
> With respect to what various people have their "habits and
> traditions" (HAT's)
> of calling "approximate", "contingent", "empirical",
> "inexact", "non-apodictic",
> "non-demonstrative", "probable" kinds or modes or styles or
> types of reasoning --
> not to mention several other choice names that I have chosen
> not to list here --
> well, you most likely know a little bit more beyond not
> having read the names,
> as "abductive reasoning" is just another name for
> "diagnosis", "guessing",
> "hypothesizing", and so on, while "inductive reasoning",
> having abdicated
> the Arthurian Siege, the Damocletian Throne, and the
> Promethean Resort,
> the very plancks and platforms of initiative and risk, to
> those pluckier
> knacks of the abductive guild -- at least, this is how
> Perseans set their
> schemes upon that Chair So Perilous -- this leaves induction
> to clean up the
> mess that is left behind, in that conscientious and dutiful
> Epimethean manner,
> after the party and the shouting and the shooting is over,
> wearily to count the
> crumbs and to reckon up the fit thing to say when it comes
> time for the Epilogue.
> In brief, inductive reasoning, to some, is just the art of
> the post hoc summation.
>
> > I was rejecting the "Into the Sky"/"Into the Ground"
> > dead-end that Jon Awbrey and Chris Menzel describe.
>
> We all enjoy ceratin habits of thought, inborn or inbred, that lead us
> to read some intrusion of our thus-borne automatic beliefs
> into a text --
> we could not avoid this short of shying away from every ever-risky act
> of interpretation itself -- but I believe that you have been a bit too
> automatic in your reading of what I wrote last time. The point that I
> was trying to make is precisely that, in order to deploy our deductive
> reasoning, mechanized and modified and mortified and
> motivated, or not,
> within that greater context of scientific inquiry -- what Peirce noted
> as a three-phase cycle of inquiry that enjoinered abductive,
> deductive,
> and inductive plancks of reasoning, most proto-typically in
> that order --
> we cannot avoid these very sorts of crashes. It is the stratagematics
> of approximation, error-correction, estimation, iteration,
> reiteration,
> eternal recursion, and so on, therefore, to try and make these crashes
> happen when the ground and the sky are still near enough by us that it
> all just seems like a whole lot of dancing and jumping and skipping or
> just plain walking. That is the way of the Peripatetic; get
> my drift?
>
> > Rejecting it in favor of some sort of hack involving an
> > isolation-of-consequences or scoping-of-names notion and
> > implicitly asking that anyone who has some idea of how to
> > do this step in and give the idea additional legitimacy
> > (if it deserves it).
> >
> > -- Fred Chase
>
> ¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~OITAUNETSE~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤
>
> Let me know if any of this is beginning to make sense
> to you -- scary as I know that the very idea might be!
>
> Jon Awbrey
>
> ¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤
>