Re: SUO: Re: Proposed SUO Content Outline
Doug McDavid wrote:
>>... In general I would like to see us
>>spending less time trying to convince each other of some particular
>>point of view, and more time working on how to reconcile multiple
>>points of view, through axioms (or whatever representation) that
>>articulate what is common, what needs to be differentiated, and for
>>what purpose.
Pat Hayes replied:
>Ah, OK. What you are talking about here is what one might call a
>meta-ontology: a theory of ontologies, with information about their
>strengths and weaknesses, what they are good for, how they relate to
>one another, etc.. That is a noble ambition, but I don't think it is
>what the SUO is trying to be. The SUO proposes to be a *single*
>upper-level ontological framework which reconciles all these various
>points of view into *one* classification heirarchy into which all
>other ontologies can be fitted. Which is one reason why many of us
>are very doubtful that it can be done.
I'm not sure what, if anything, "the SUO" has ever proposed.
In my KR book, I was pushing very hard for the infinite lattice
of theories and something like a "metalevel" for reasoning
about which one(s) is/are appropriate for any given problem.
>.... Most of this information space hasnt
>even been explored or properly surveyed, let alone carved up.
Of course not. The problem will keep growing as long as there
is more science left to be done. (And I strongly disagree with
those people who think that science is coming to an end.)
That is the whole point of the Knowledge Soup chapter of my KR
book: the lattice of all possible theories is open ended, and
you use metalevel reasoning to find which one is appropriate
to your problem.
>Sorry if Im one of the old cynical guys, but Ive been doing this
>stuff for about 30 years now, as have many other people in AI, and it
>doesnt seem that anything dramatic has changed. Moores law has been
>going on for a while now, but that kind of advance doesnt make the
>representational issues any easier. Ian is still talking about the
>situation calculus (reference McCarthy 1961, or thereabouts), and
>others are still getting hyped about modal logics (references from
>mid-60s), so where are the new ideas coming from?
I'm even more cynical. I don't think that there has been
much significant progress on fundamental conceptual frameworks
since Aristotle. But that is one reason why I think that there
is some hope: we don't really need any conceptual breakthroughs
in order to get something useful done.
John