re:re:Re: SUO: Continuants and Occurrents in 4D
On Mon, 12 Mar 2001 14:13:07 -0600 pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu> wrote:
### Pat pls note this is a reply to an older interesting msg by you.
Sorry for the length, but it did require somewhat of a think.
>John Sowa:
>
>> >I would agree. And 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.
>
>Robert Meersman:
>
>>### 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
>
>Im afraid I disagree, and moreover think that this view is profoundly
>misleading (please don't quote Peircian chapter and verse in
>response.) Here's why, in brief: it confuses *semantic* issues with
>*epistemic* issues; it assumes that meaning is ultimately concerned
>with what 'we' (or maybe 'they') can know, and how they come to know
>it. I think this is deeply and profoundly ass-backwards, since until
>we have some reasonably clear account of what it is that we (or they)
>are knowing, it is both premature and rather hopeless to try to think
>about how it is that it (whatever it is) can be known. Meaning is not
>reducible to agency; rather, agency presumes meaning.
### Pat,
### First of all I am not a Peircian (I think) and have never read
anything by him so far --in fact only yesterday in the Stanford bookstore
I bought a first book with some of Peirce's writings... will start it on
the plane home, and tell you afterwards whether he agrees with me :-)
.
.and not to worry, I will put a Tom Clancy jacket around it while
reading it in public :-)
### But in the meantime surely you don't want to imply that the only "true"
meaning must be something "absolute", independent of everything such as
observers, agents, users, ...?
### For my position on semantics through agreement I don't yet feel the need
to hide behind some long-dead philosopher's back but would rather want to
report from a long experience with data modeling that in practice --a qualifier
to which I return below-- there is no such thing as "one truth", but *every*
registered fact, rule, event etc. is the result of an explicit or implicit
agreement. Until the "ultimate" laws of physics are known, physicists and
everybody else will still need to agree on the observed outcome of experiments
and e.g. agree whether they conform or contradict the current ontology
and its laws. Actually, in modern physics such agreements become ever
less evident to make, as I am sure you are well aware of.
### Now even *if* these laws will *ever* be known, the reductionism required
to describe everyday things and events in them will likely render them
useless for any practical (again) ontology. Who knows, there even may be
real information-theoretic limits for this, such as not enough matter in
the universe to construct an intelligence that is able to interpret them.
(Probably not a useful hypothesis, as there will be no matter left to plug
it in a wall outlet but it sure is fun to talk & think at this scale,
isn't it *grin* ).
### So the question comes around; how can we establish meaningful
communication about anything at all *without* such an absolute ontology...
as e.g. humans seem to have achieved notwithstanding and to a reasonable
extent over a few 100K years? This is where in my opinion the practical
aspect must come into play. As I said before, if the purpose of the SUO
effort is to capture all of physics, logic, and other science, etc. first,
before it will/can address pragmatic issues such as "how will one be able
to use it", *ahem*, this may be philosophically very satisfying and great
fun (I confess also to me in fact) but risks to appear as a waste of time
to many.
### (goes on further down)
>
>> (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?
>
>That is not too trivial by any means, but I think it is a very bad
>methodology. How will the project get started? You need to 'include'
>a theory of agency, etc., into the ontology. Now, how does one
>include anything in an ontology? One writes axioms about it (or them)
>with the intention of representing in those axioms enough information
>about the things in question that relevant questions can be answered
>by drawing conclusions from those axioms. So the proposal amounts to
>begin by writing an axiomatic theory of cognitive agents, procedures
>by which they arrive at agreements, and contexts in which they
>perform. Now, how will you get started on writing those axioms? This
>is where we came in, of ocurse, but doesnt that seem like a rather
>bad place to *start*? Cogntive agents are rather complicated things
>compared to, say, processes arising in the oil industry, or clay
>being fired in kilns. And you still need to know if these cognitive
>agents and their doings are going to be described as continuants or
>4-d histories or whatever.
### I disagree that you have to be able to do this first and even less
that it would constitute bad methodology; why cannot we establish the
role of the cognitive agents as axioms and first-class players in an
ontology paradigm. You don't need to model them (at first) since their
behavior by definition occurs *outside* the ontology. They can even be
made implicit: the set of cognitive agents associated with a part of the
ontology may be exactly those that agree on the facts and rules in it,
i.e. hold them in their beliefs. BTW movement of "individual agents"
between sets will be of no concern to us (at first), and it would also
allow for instance multiple internally consistent but mutually
contradictory belief sets to co-exist in the same ontology. Naturally
this leads to interesting logical and representational issues; I don't
carry my literature database with me now but I remember asking a prominent
logician a few years ago about possible logics for this and got a
negative at the time. It occurred to me that several of the categorization
arguments in SUO could and maybe should in fact be decided by the eventual
(future) ability of agents (i.e. ontology designers) to move more easily
between belief sets. For instance, it may feel easier to retract a 4D fact
than a 3D fact since one can just qualify its validity by a time interval.
Or, modeling things as occurrents may prove to allow easier identification
between things occurring in different contexts but alleged to be the same.
But I readily admit I don't have a formal argument for this as yet. If one
at all exists...
### And of course this brings me back to the issue of future practical
use of an ontology. Qualifying belief sets (or contexts, or what have you)
by "their" cognitive agents allows them to start off in the middle of the
"reductionist scale", by defining facts as high level axioms without
worrying (initially) about consistency with other agents' contexts
--but of course maintaining intra-context consistency. Note this has
been happening for 50 years now as database designers were making their
little avant-la-lettre "ontologies", called data models, for specific
applications; problems appeared only in the 90s when interoperability
requirements became important, of course. In fact I think some work that
has happened in the database field on view and schema integration may be
relevant to the SUO enterprise at one point; one of the things discovered
was that generalizing everything to "entity relates_to entity", while
always true and therefore *very* interoperable rarely yielded useful
data models.
>
>Pat Hayes
>
>PS. John's suggested definition (above) of continuant/occurrent is
>faulty on at least three counts. First, it doesn't actually capture
>the meaning, since one can easily recognize an occurrent when it is
>seen a second time, eg if you ever go to use the rest room during a
>football match, you will have no trouble recognising that you are at
>the same match when you get back. Second, even if it was adequate,
>it isn't a definition of continuant, but a way to transcribe the
>occurrent notion into a 4-d ontological framework without
>acknowledging the continuant identity criteria, which we already know
>is easy; and third, it uses scare-quotes, which is just a way of not
>actually giving a real definition, but saying something that looks
>like a definition, but isn't really: as Russell said (in a different
>context), it has all the advantages of theft over honest toil.
### hmmm... could be, but frankly the more I hear this discussion the
less I understand the notions involved. Are we sure this discussion is
not being held for its own sake? And, to throw in some good old
Albert E. of Emceesquared, "it is not because something is true
that it is a statement about reality".
--Robert Meersman