SUO: RE: RE: A proposed SUO content outline - role of philosophy
Ian,
You wrote:
From what you
say below, it sounds like you are recommending that we put a halt to the
actual ontology construction, take a step back, and get straight about the
philosophical foundations before we go any further. Well, this approach,
one might regard it as 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.
I am not sure what you are trying to say here - this is a point you have
made many times, but as far as I can understand it does not make sense.
What you seem to be saying is this:
There is a problem P. The world's greatest minds have worked on this problem
for 2500 years - many of them devoting a major part of their lives to
resolving it. They have not come up with an answer to this problem with
which most people can agree.
Therefore, I (Ian Niles) am going to solve this problem by ignoring all the
work they have done. This seems to me (Ian Niles) the best way of answering
the question that the philosophers were trying to solve.
We can even apply this argument in other areas:
Physicists have been trying to find a TOE (Theory of Everything) since its
earliest beginnings. So far they have no succeeded. They have, for example,
not managed to find exact theories, only reaching an accuracy of 10*-28m. We
will manage to avoid their failure by ignoring all the work they have done.
Surely you must know some of the history of philosophy. Mathematics and
science were originally within the scope of philosophy, hence its name in
some old universities of Natural Philosophy, and these are now successful
enterprises. So philosophy has not done so badly. I suggest you consider
Kuhn's division of disciplines into pre- and post-paradigm. Does a lack of a
general agreement (in fact, I suspect there are large areas of agreement in
ontology) imply that there is nothing of value there? Then we can dismiss
and ignore all the soft sciences.
I suspect part of the answer to what is going on here is that ontological
engineers and ontological philosophers are not asking the same questions -
so it should be unsurprising that the ontological philosophers have not
answered the ontological engineers' questions. But they are working in the
same territory.
Just as process engineers will take what they need from their related
science (and pay due respect to the scientists' achievements), it makes
sense for the ontological engineers to do the same to their 'science'
counterparts. And just as engineers make do with scientific theories that
have been discarded by scientists as too inaccurate for their enterprise
(e.g. Newtonian physics), so the ontological engineers can make use of some
of the philosophical theories.
If you were arguing for:
1) only taking the philosophical theories that are useful for the job in
hand (i.e. not taking philosophical input uncritically) and/or
2) that a pure philosophical training does not prepare you for the job in
hand (i.e. pure philosophers do not make good ontological engineers),
I would be the first to agree with you.
My personal experience in dealing with commercial systems (as with Matthew's
in a different commercial domain) is that a large number of the
philosophical notions are directly relevant (and also that some do not seem
to have any relevance).
Most basic textbooks on metaphysics give you some basic notions (and
questions), which are useful in building an ontology (e.g.
Endurantist/Perdurantist - and the Statue/Clay question) - why should we
ignore them?
Your comments seem to me no more than prejudice - though I am more than
willing to listen to an explanation.
My version of your story is much simpler.
IT engineers have been trying to semantically integrate commercial systems
for decades.
They have ignored many of the semantic (philosophical) issues and had only a
little success - and at great cost.
Most of the worlds biggest companies are trying to semantically integrate
their systems at great cost - and with little understanding of the
underlying issues.
The lesson seems to be - if you want to spend a lot of money and achieve
little, ignore the semantic issues (this includes the
philosophical/ontological ones).
Hence I see underlying your comments a guarantee of expensive failure.
However, I would whole-heartedly agree with the use of 'lower-level'
structure as a mechanism for testing the higher-level structure. In fact, I
think it is important to follow the philosophers' example and have a series
of well-understood test cases (e.g. Statue/Clay) for checking the
implications of a position.
Regards
Chris
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
[mailto:owner-standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org]On Behalf Of Ian Niles
Sent: 26 February 2001 20:22
To: Standard-Upper-Ontology (E-mail)
Subject: SUO: RE: A proposed SUO content outline
Hi John,
I agree with you that one of the biggest challenges in constructing
an overarching ontology is that many of the various chunks that have to be
merged to create the ontology will be, to a lesser or greater extent,
incompatible. In some cases, the incompatibilities can be smoothed over by
tweaking the formalizations; in other cases, wholesale theoretical revision
may be required. Although we agree that this is a major challenge for our
project, I guess we disagree about how it should be tackled. From what you
say below, it sounds like you are recommending that we put a halt to the
actual ontology construction, take a step back, and get straight about the
philosophical foundations before we go any further. Well, this approach,
one might regard it as 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.
In any case, I would argue for a "reflective equilibrium" approach
to ontology design. Let's start with a set of high-level categories and
then successively incorporate new content into the ontology. As we discover
incompatibilities between new content and existing content, we can resolve
them on a case-by-case basis. If we find that some high-level categories
are not needed to support lower-level nodes, then we can excise them from
the conceptual structure. If we find that a lower-level structure can be
simplified by locating part of its semantic endowment in a new higher-level
node (from which the lower-level structure can inherit this content), we can
add that node to the ontology. It seems to me that this sort of approach
has the advantage of making the various incompatibilities between formal
theories as concrete as possible (as Wittgenstein once pointed out, many
philosophical muddles can be traced to a dearth of real examples).
Furthermore, it has the benefit of incrementally building up an engineering
artifact that could potentially be very useful for integrating information
systems, even if we have to neglect some philosophical niceties.
-Ian
> -----Original Message-----
> From: John F. Sowa [mailto:sowa@bestweb.net]
> Sent: Saturday, February 24, 2001 9:19 AM
> To: West, Matthew MR SSI-GREA-UK; Standard-Upper-Ontology (E-mail)
> Subject: Re: SUO: RE: RE: A proposed SUO content outline
>
>
>
> Dear Matthew and Ian,
>
> Every term on your outline is necessary for a complete system
> of knowledge representation. Indeed, all of these terms have
> been used for many years in mathematics and physics, and they
> have been formalized, axiomatized, and reasoned and computed
> with in great depth in many different ways for a long time.
>
> The big question is not whether they belong in the SUO. The
> answer to that is simple: yes, of course.
>
> Even the issue of writing definitions and axioms for them is
> not a big problem. There are plenty of axiomatizations for all
> of them that can be taken out of the literature of math, logic,
> and physics, dusted off, and translated into KIF, CGs, and
> many other notations.
>
> One issue that has to be recognized: all those axioms
> were designed for different purposes, and they use very
> different primitives. As an example, I use the Eulerian and
> Langrangian systems of coordinates for fluid mechanics. Many
> of the same phenomena can be represented in either one, but
> the representations have very different structures and
> relationships. That is true of all those categories in
> the outline: there are many, many different coordinate
> systems and representations that have been used, all of them
> are valuable for different purposes, but the relationships
> between them are very far from clear. Taking one coordinate
> system instead of another is a purely arbitrary choice, and
> you have to know how they are related before you can make
> a rational decision about how they should be positioned
> in the ontology.
>
> The first thing that has to be determined is which of these
> issues belong to the logic, which of them belong to the
> ontology, how the logic relates to the ontology, and how
> the logic and the ontology relate to the real world and/or
> any possible world, situation, state of affairs, etc. And
> the next thing is how can you reason about them with the
> logic and talk about them with language(s) you want to use.
>
> We all know that the knowledge representation must accommodate
> individuals, states, events, space, time, space-time, process,
> activity, agents, etc. But you cannot start to put these things
> into a hierarchy until you have a very clear idea of what these
> things are, how you can refer to them in logic, how they are
> classifiable by the ontology (Note: classifiable is a
> prerequisite to being classified), and how they relate to
> what is in the world, what is perceived by humans, animals,
> or robots, how evidence for them is obtained, etc.
>
> Only after these questions are answered, does it become
> possible to say where you can position the categories in
> the hierarchy, outline, or whatever you want to call it.
>
> Compared to that, questions like the following are a tiny,
> insignificant little nit:
>
> >MW: Do you have some things in the merged ontology that are
> not found here?
>
> >(e.g. holes).
>
> We still haven't answered where the concepts of Circle, Sphere,
> and Cube belong. When we know where those belong, then maybe
> we can begin to talk about holes in a cube or sphere.
>
> All of Ian's questions about the following list are well taken,
> but that is barely scratching the surface of the ones that must
> be addressed before we can put these topics into some ordering:
>
> >> > 1. Thing
> >> > 1.1. Individual
> >> > 1.1.1. State
> >> > 1.1.1.1. Period of Time
> >> > 1.1.1.2. Activity
> >> > 1.1.1.3. Physical Object
> >> > 1.1.1.3.1. Materialised Physical Object
> >> > 1.1.1.3.2. Functional Physical Object
> >> > 1.1.1.3.3. Stream
> >> > 1.1.2. Temporal Boundary
> >> > 1.1.2.1. Point in Time
> >> > 1.1.2.2. Event
> >> > 1.2. Collection
> >> > 1.2.1. Class
> >> > 1.2.1.1. Class of Individual
> >> > 1.2.1.1.1. Quantifiable Property
> >> > 1.2.1.1.2. Role
> >> > 1.2.1.1.3. Status
> >> > 1.2.1.1.4. Organisational Level
> >> > 1.2.1.1.4.1. Shape
> >> > 1.2.1.1.5. Information Pattern
> >> > 1.2.1.2. Class of Class
> >> > 1.2.1.2.1. Number
> >> > 1.2.1.2.2. Class of Relation
> >> > 1.2.1.2.2.1. Specialisation
> >> > 1.2.1.2.2.2. Unit of Measure Mapping of Property to Number Space
> >> > 1.2.1.2.2.3. Class of Representation
> >> > 1.2.1.2.2.3.1. Identification
> >> > 1.2.1.2.2.3.2. Definition
> >> > 1.2.1.2.2.3.3. Description
> >> > 1.2.1.3. Relation
> >> > 1.2.1.3.1. Classification
> >> > 1.2.1.3.2. Cause and Effect
> >> > 1.2.1.3.3. Whole-Part
> >> > 1.2.1.3.3.1. Fusion Whole-Part
> >> > 1.2.1.3.3.2. Arrangement Whole-Part
> >> > 1.2.1.3.3.3. Assembly Whole-Part
> >> > 1.2.1.3.3.4. Feature Whole-Part
> >> > 1.2.1.3.3.5. Temporal Whole-Part
> >> > 1.2.1.3.3.6. Participation in Activity
> >> > 1.2.1.3.3.7. Temporal Bounding of State
> >> > 1.2.1.3.3.8. Containment of Individual
> >> > 1.2.1.3.4. Connection
> >> > 1.2.1.3.5. Temporal Sequence
> >> > 1.2.1.3.6. Involvement in Activity
> >> > 1.2.2. Set
>
> Every level of this outline raises very serious questions about
> why things are placed on that level, how they are related to
> their siblings or their parents and children. Why, for example,
> is "period of time" under "state"? What is time? Why is
> "cause and effect" a sibling node of "whole-part"? What is
> causality? How does causality relate to time? Which is more
> fundamental, time or causality? Which one presupposes the
> other in its definition? Why?
>
> Having a laundry list of items to be considered is useful.
> But without a very serious answer to all these questions,
> it should not considered as anything that has any more
> structure than a laundry list.
>
> John Sowa
>
>