ONT Re: Inquiry Driven Systems
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let me take a break from the formal presentation
of 'inquiry driven systems' and try to give a more
intuitive picture of what's going on here, and what
it all has to do with designing basic ontology tools.
the big idea, and the big trouble, arises when you
try jam together various notions of 'system', like
the 'hard' notions of dynamical systems that are
used everywhere from hardball physics to fuzzy
cybernetics and the 'soft' notions that are
used everywhere from formal sciences like
logic and math to software engineering.
i frequently think of these differences as playing
along a spectrum from 'dynamic' to 'symbolic', and
so the next problem that arises for my part is how
to arrive at a more integrated concept of a system,
one that pays its dues to both dynamic and symbolic
aspects of the whole ball'o'wax.
dynamic. life is really simple, alaf (at least at first),
from this point of view. everything that happens is just
a matter of a point moving through a space, that is to say,
an 'orbit' or a 'path' or a 'trajectory' in a 'phase space'
or a 'state space', depending on who is telling the story.
so it's all just a matter of 'differential geometry'. sure.
the problem is saying what the space is, and what is the law
of dynamics that tells a repesentative point or a test point,
that is, what the 'agent' or the 'system' has now been reduced
to, where to go, differentially speaking, from moment to moment.
symbolic. for me, this evokes the notion of a 'sign relation',
but i think that most folks would probably start with some idea
of a 'formal system', maybe taking off from the sort of syntactic
system that we typically form up in a 'formal language' and then
tossing in a pinch of semantics from model theory, or maybe they
would start with an off-the-shelf idea of a software system like
a programming language or an application interface.
that's the basic setup, enough to eatup a decade of one's life,
or two or three, but it raises such a cloud'o'dust in my mind
that i will have to break here for a cup'o'coffee. back soon.
jon awbrey
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