re:Re: SUO: Continuants and Occurrents in 4D
Robert,
Your point about agents is well taken. That is another
area where I disagree with Nicola and even more strongly with
Barry. They don't provide any means for including the agent
in the formalism. To be brief, "I" and "we" in that discussion
can be considered any agent (human, animal, robot, or whatever).
>>.... in fact, I think that the distinction
>>between the terms "continuant" and "occurrent" can be quite
>>nicely defined in Whitehead's terms: A continuant is something
>>that we can recognize at multiple encounters. An occurrent is
>>something that does not have enough distinctive characteristics
>>that we can be sure whether another encounter is with "the same"
>>or "a similar" entity.
>### a most enlightening definition I must say. But in it, and in
>fact in all of the above, who are these "we" and "I" who do the
>recognizing and identifying... I tried to observe before that all
>of semantics constitutes an agreement among cognitive agents (e.g.
>two persons who agree they are pointing at the same occurrent; or
>one agent who agrees with himself that he is looking at an instance
>of the same continuant after a while, etc etc. Is this too trivial
>to mention, or am I too obtuse, in hypothesizing that we include
>these cognitive agents, AND perhaps the procedure by which they
>arrive at their agreements, AND the contexts that must restrict or
>qualify these agreements, as first-class citizens in any ontological
>design process? Or has somebody been there & done that? I'd like a
>reference so I may catch up in that case
I have been arguing very strongly for recognition of the
methods by which "identity" can be established. Barry Smith
simply dismissed that issue as "confusing ontology with
epistemology". And I simply dismissed Barry.
>### I am in the process of reading Nicola's and Chris Welty's latest
>paper on this (Identity and Subsumption) obtained from the Padova
>LADSEB-CNR site and incidentally so far I can't find much there
>to support many recent statements by others about Nicola's claimed
>position on this identity issue there, in fact they rather seem to
>recant, reformulate and make more precise a lot of stuff from their
Some of those examples were taken from discussions we have
had with Nicola. But you should ask Nicola.
>earlier work on this subject, if I read it correctly. [Nicola! are
>you listening?]
>### In John's statement above, the key hidden elements in my opinion again
are these implied silent agents who are "given assurance", allegedly "are mistaken"
and have or not "reasonable doubt". Without the implied agreement by them in
spite of these mistakes, doubts, ... the identification process and its result
would be, in a quite formal sense, meaningless
I completely agree. This is another point of dispute that I
have with Nicola and some of his buddies, especially Barry.
One of Nicola's distinctions is a version of Husserl's
distinction of independent and nonindependent entities.
I observed that Husserl's distinction is the first two
parts of one of Peirce's triads, which I called Independent,
Relative, and Mediating in my KR book. The third category
makes room for the agent's intention, choice, purpose, or
need that determines why the second is dependent on the first.
But Barry doesn't like that. He is one of those people who
never read Peirce. (He went to Oxford as an undergrad.)
John Sowa