Re: SUO: Universal Time, other universals, and cultural context
"Bernard Vatant" <bernard@universimmedia.com> stated:
> >>> My deep conviction - and I hope it's shared by many people in this forum -
> >>> is that any ontology is deeply rooted in a language and
> >>> cultural context, and cannot be easily exported to other contexts.
> >>
Pat Hayes thinks:
> >> My deep conviction is exactly the opposite. If the SUO reflects any
> >> linguistic bias then it will be the less useful for it, which is one
> >> reason why NL intuitions should be avoided, or at any rate treated
> >> skeptically.
> >
> On 16.05.2001 15:56 Uhr, "David Whitten" <whitten@lynx.eaze.net> wrote:
> > I'm not sure which side my deepest convictions lie.
> > I think an ontology is not the same as a world view.
> > a world view is deeply rooted in a language and cultural context.
> > an ontology is a set of propositions.
> >
> > a proposition may have language and cultural context embedded in it.
> > Consider a proposition stated by someone from a fatalistic, deterministic
> > culture.
> > Consider a proposition stated by a rigorously informal 'mystical' culture
> > that believes all experience is wheels within wheels/dynamically redefined.
> >
> > I expect these two propositions would have a different 'meaning', even if
> > they both purport to describe the same 'event' at some 4-D location.
>
Bill Andersen <andersen@ontologyworks.com> stated:
> I don't think I agree with much of this at all. Call me a purist, but no
> logical theory or set of propositions *is* an "ontology". An Ontology
> (big-O) is an inventory of the things that one takes to exist. A
> proposition (the kind of thing capable of bearing a truth value) is one of
> those things that one finds in some folks Ontologies.
>
> An "ontology" (small-O) is the term commonly misused to name the latter
> concept. It may have a logical expression, in which case the name is OK,
> but this needs to be kept separate.
Hmm. in thinking about it, I realize that I have something more attached
to the word "ontology" (small-O) than just a set of propositions, so I
may need to rephrase/back-off from my earlier definition.
A theory, to me, is a set of propositions.
An ontology, to me, includes
a set of facts (connectives with relations and constant names and functions)
a set of rules (for-all/there-exists statements with variables/quantifiers)
a taxonomy of facts (constant-names) ordered with
structural predicates like instance-of/class-of/has-a.
A well-defined model theory suitable for logical inference.
Conceptually, at least, an ontology is closed under logical inference.
For me, this is an ideal, and I have the idea of a family of ontologies
that are the result of n-applications of inferencing rules.
I expect this is a rather well understood idea, but in case it is original,
I mean that if a proposition is true and there is an inference rule
that states the truth of some other proposition is implied by the truth
of the first proposition, that the 1-application of that inference rule
includes the second proposition as explicitly true much as the first was
explicitly true.
Is this definition of "ontology" (small-O) something like what you meant
by an inventory of the things that one takes to exist?
or is your Ontology (big-O) closer to what I called a world view ?
David