RE: SUO: On Clay and Vase
Dear Pat,
> Lac Leman is easy, by the way. There is persuasive evidence that
> kids' thinking gets to that stage when they are about 4 years old. If
> you want to think about what goes on inside an car engine or inside a
> Xerox machine, you need to consider 'things' like histories of
> pressure gradients, which have even more elusive and transient ways
> of overlapping with other things in spacetime. It seems odd to say
> that a pressure gradient *is* the oil.
>
MW: This is about property distributions. I know someone in EPISTLE/SC4 who
has done some good work on this.
Regards
Matthew
============================================================
Matthew West
Operations & Asset Management - Shell Services International
Shell Visiting Professor, The Keyworth Institute
H3229, Shell Centre, London, SE1 7NA, UK.
Tel: +44 207 934 4490 Fax: 7929 Mobile: +44 7796 336538
http://www.shellservices.com/
http://www.keyworth.leeds.ac.uk/
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/
============================================================
> -----Original Message-----
> From: pat hayes [mailto:phayes@ai.uwf.edu]
> Sent: 09 March 2001 18:39
> To: West, Matthew MR SSI-GREA-UK
> Cc: John F. Sowa; Chris Partridge; standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
> Subject: Re: SUO: On Clay and Vase
>
>
> >Dear John,
> >
> > > The main thing that I object to in Nicola's position is his
> > > interpretation of identity and his claim that the statue
> > > and the clay are two different things. That is not something
> > > that either scientists or the proverbial T. C. Mits would say.
> >
> >Well actually in the usual case the piece of clay and the
> vase are two
> >different objects under a 4D view. This is because normally,
> the vase is
> >made from a single piece of clay. Thus the spatio-temporal
> extent of the
> >piece of clay is different from the spatio-temporal extent
> of the vase
> >(except when both come into existance and cease to exist at
> the same time).
> >So normally the vase is a sub-state of the piece of clay.
> Whilst the piece
> >of clay is also the vase the two are of course co-incident.
> >
> >I'm sure you know this, but others may not.
>
> Yes. And if we consider things which consist(in part) of liquids,
> things get even more complicated. For example, Lac Leman is
> considered to be an object in most accounts of geography and by the
> people who live on its shores. But one can also view it as simply a
> wide part of the Rhône (which flows in at one end of the Lac and out
> at the other). There are two ways to cut up the space-time history of
> the lake: one treats it as geographically fixed, with water flowing
> through it; the other identifies particular mereological sums of H2O
> molecules (and assorted detrius, dissolved gases, etc.) which are
> moving through space, ie sloping in space-time. These different kinds
> of history can only coincide for a moment. They are like two
> different spatiotemporal textures drawn at an angle to each other,
> each set of lines covering the entire space, but never parallel.
> (Either of them might qualify as a continuant, by the way; but they
> couldn't both be continuants at the same, er, time.) In order to
> think about the lake with the proficiency of an ordinary Swiss bloke
> (and probably with that of ordinary Swiss fish, for that matter) one
> needs to be able to reason with both kinds of history; and if these
> are both 'things', then they are things that coincide only for a
> moment anywhere.
>
> Lac Leman is easy, by the way. There is persuasive evidence that
> kids' thinking gets to that stage when they are about 4 years old. If
> you want to think about what goes on inside an car engine or inside a
> Xerox machine, you need to consider 'things' like histories of
> pressure gradients, which have even more elusive and transient ways
> of overlapping with other things in spacetime. It seems odd to say
> that a pressure gradient *is* the oil.
>
> Pat Hayes
>
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