Re: SUO: Ever Ending Stories
>Jon,
>
>Yes, I believe that should be the guiding principle of the SUO:
>
> >What you are saying here clicks in with the major shift that took
> >place in my own thinking...
> > that this whole
> >turn was analogous to the paradigm shift that Aristotle motivated
> >when he rephrased the "Big Question", just by way of getting some
> >handle on it, to ask, not so much what things are, which we could
> >not get directly at, as it was already becoming rather tiresomely
> >clear even way back then, but what are all of us saying about the
> >way things are, and what would it take to have any hope of making
> >any of this jibe?
>
>I agree.
I don't think that anyone disagrees. Obviously, any axiomatic
ontology constitutes a knowledge representation which is saying
something about the ways things are. All the discussions on this list
are about comparing and contrasting different such representational
strategies. The terms 'perdurantist' and 'endurantist' refer to
representational strategies.
Re-iterating these obvious platitudes is like standing in a
carpenter's shop and announcing portentiously that this is all really
to do with *wood*. True, of course, but don't expect it to impress
the people with tools in their hands.
>I believe that we will make a lot more progress towards a
>useful SUO if we focus on how to represent what scientists
>and ordinary human beings want to say.
I can't help noting that Whitehead was rather an extaordinary human
being, and that you have unaccountably omitted engineers and
enterprise modellers from your list.
Pat Hayes
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