SUO: RE: Continuants and Occurrents in 4D
Chris,
There is a big difference between saying that an entire
world view is incompatible with another and saying that
one particular definition of one of the predicates is
difficult and perhaps impossible to translate to the other.
>The point is not that people (and Pat) have complained that 'Endurantist'
>and 'Perdurantist' views cannot be translated. It is that one view cannot be
>expressed in the language of the other. So, for example, in your preferred
>Perdurantist Whiteheadean view (a general preference I share) it seems
>difficult (impossible) to describe the standard Endurantist view - where
>continuants are wholly present at each point in time at which they exist.
>However, I thought your position was that you preferred a general collection
>of theories in which Whiteheadean Perdurantism would co-exist peacefully
>(and consistently) with Endurantism.
This objection merely amounts to saying that Peter Simons'
definition (which I think is a good one) is difficult to
translate. So then I suggested a different definition, which
is meaningful in both a 3-D and a 4-D coordinate system,
and which has a very large overlap with Simons' definition.
Difficulties like this occur all the time at every level of
the ontology. When banks merge, they discover that they have
different definitions of "checking account". But that doesn't
mean that their entire world views are incompatible.
If you want to merge the ontologies, then you fiddle around
with the definitions. In the worst case (which usually turns
out to be the most common case), you end up with the union of
all the definitions, and each predicate has a suffix to indicate
which original it came from.
Resolution: If you have a predicate P with two different
definitions, you have an inconsistency. But if you have P1
with one definition and P2 with another definition, there is
no inconsistency. To minimize duplication, what standards
organizations usually do is to rename P1 to be P, to keep
P2 available for backwards compatibility, but to say that P2
is "deprecated" -- i.e., not recommended for future development.
John Sowa