Re: ONT Re: Inquiry Driven Systems
Jon --
I meant to keep this discussion on-list, and just forgot to hit my "reply
to all" button. Thanks for noticing that.
We are now on a footing of very substantial mutual understanding. You have
coined a term which perfectly expresses what I intended to say, and that
term is "peer communication". We are also in perfect agreement that your
concern is with "dialogue in nature", which you have stated many times over
the last many months, and neologized acronymically as "DIN". I have
personally learned a lot from your writings, which have given me cause to
pause to think of things from a fresh perspective, even when I have not
always had the time or ability to fully understand and assimilate your
arguments.
At the same time, I think this may be the source of much of the
unpleasantness that has erupted from time to time in this venue around your
work. I suspect (though I won't presume to speak for them), that some
significant number of the participants in the IEEE ontology lists are more
focused on the peer communication (PC) problem than the DIN. If this is at
all the case, then large numbers of complex and demanding utterances of the
DIN variety would tend to be seen as diverting from the main line of PC
discussion.
It seems to me that what you are doing is a two-fold endeavor. One purpose
is to work out fundamental issues in a dialogic manner, hoping to engage
with a community who might be expected to share, or least understand, the
issues of human and artificial thought over which your professional inquiry
ranges. The other purpose is to create a repository of material that can
be used to illuminate specific issues of the larger DIN inquiry, when they
have particular bearing on the ongoing PC inquiry. At least this is the
way I think of the material you are posting. It is like the content of a
seminar, which, while I haven't registered this semester, is being
delivered now. But because it is being delivered into a public and
permanent record, it will be available in any semester when my schedule is
not filled with other requirements and electives.
Now, with respect to practitioners, I agree that this is an important
issue. I have never really lived outside the practitioner community, and I
know that the anyting that is available to make their jobs easier. A
massive library of standards and utilities has been built up, such that
even the most idiosyncratic practitioners find it natural to use existing
operating system utilities, user interface widgets, and the like. I think
some of us on this list have an idea that a set of ontological utilities
may be created that will take their place in the library of practitioner
tools, in a similar way. Beyond that, when it comes to matters of
integration across multi-enterprise e-business value nets, the very essence
of the practitioner mission is to provide for semantic transparency of
commerce. Practitioners in such an environment know that only at their
peril can they allow their idiosyncrasies to trump the mission.
In any event, now that we have the language of the PC subset of the
universe of DIN, I for one will have a sturdier platform to stand on as the
Awbrey Express rumbles on by. Thanks for all of that.
With highest regards,
Doug
Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>@majordomo.ieee.org on 01/13/2002 02:36:03
AM
Sent by: owner-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org
To: Douglas McDavid/Boulder/IBM@IBMUS
cc: Ontology <ontology@ieee.org>
Subject: ONT Re: Inquiry Driven Systems
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david, i will keep this onlist in hopes
it will save us both repeating ourselves.
Douglas McDavid wrote:
>
> Jon --
>
> My terseness seems to have gotten in the way of communication.
i think i understand the problem -- hah! -- but sometimes
what gets in the way of communication is that the receiver
is in amidst of thinking about some other thing at the time ...
> When I said what I said, I was not thinking about the time
> a sign was first invented or created. I was thinking about
> any time a sign is used in attempt to communicate with others.
> The issue I meant to indicate was that of utterance, not of coinage.
okay. you are talking about a 'communication situation'.
a comm situation, when it's working ok, works this way,
with transmitters uttering and receivers understanding,
but the whole setup depends on pre-established channels
and cultures and languages and media and many other
delicate contingencies. you are also focused on
what we might call 'peer communication', whereas
i worry alot about the 'dialogue in nature',
where nature is not our peer, and it's our
job to learn her (?) rules. the question
for me is what do we peers mostly need
to talk about in the first place, and
the first thing that comes to my mind
is the things that we have learned
or need to learn from nature, or
reality or whatever you call it.
that is one of the reasons that i use the word 'signs' and always
try to remind myself that basic experience and data of the senses
are signs, too, from which buzzing booming manifold chaos we need
to form concepts just to begin to grasp it all, and these conceits
are just the stuff that ontologies are made on.
i would suggest that one of the reasons that language proper, say,
in a peer communication context, works at all for social objectives,
is that it analogues or icons the way that communing with nature
functions, as an adjunct way of getting to the realities that
impinge on life and society and other things we care about.
> It seems to me your inquiry-oriented approach is taken from the position
> that there is a universe of signs everywhere one looks or listens, and
> that the process of interest is how the observer sorts through the
> barrage in order to make meaning out of it.
well, i would have a bit of trouble calling it 'inquiry-centric',
since to whole point of inquiry and pragma thinking in general
is to stay oriented to objects in reality that impinge on us
whether we like it or not, so the sign process itself is
always at the periphery.
> This, of course, is a process that is ongoing on a continuous basis,
> and your inquiry into this inquiry is rich and deep and complex,
> and intrinsically interesting.
okay, its recursive, but not solely navel-inspection, as the object
remains,
and the real question is: how to get better at dealing with realities over
which we have less control than we would like to have in the end, we think.
> My point, however, is that there are two sides to this process.
> In addition to perception and interpretation, there is also (and
> earlier) intention and utterance (where utterance can be verbal,
> drawn, written, etc.).
yes, but, how do we conceive the concepts that we communicate?
and why are we trying to communicate? what is the object of
communication? how does a channel, a medium come into being?
why do we have these very typical sorts of comm problems,
with which the suo and the web in general are very rife,
when different media and interps and cultures collide?
we are already in the middle of an ongoing mess-age
that is dysfunctioning somehow and we need to try
to remember the function of concepts and language
and media if we are going to bring back the func.
> My assumption is that ontology, of the type that would be interesting
> to an engineering group such as IEEE, is a mechanism of disambiguation.
> Such a mechanism, to my way of thinking, is a tool for the uttering party
> to use to make utterance as unambiguous as possible. In this way, we can
> narrow the universe of signage to those signs that are uttered in the
presence
> of an ontology, with the express intent of making them as unambiguous as
possible
> to the intended audience -- an audience that has a high degree of
likelihood to
> be sensitized and expectant of specific types of signs being emitted by
specific
> individuals or classes of utterers.
this is how it is when it's working, maybe,
but if that's all there was to it it would
be working already, and it's clearly not.
so a diagnostic phase is in order now.
what you call 'ambiguity' in the peer comm situation lines up to me
with what i call 'uncertainty' or 'entropy' in the wider situation.
our 'dialogue in nature' (din) is rife with annoying ambiguities,
for sure. nature and reality are telling us something that we
know is very important, but we do not understand exactly what
the message or command is saying to us. what is the means
by which we resolve this ambiguity? it has many names.
i call it 'inquiry'.
> This, of course, drastically narrows the domain of interest,
> from interpretation by humans of every sensory impingement
> to a more conscious, utilitarian, and bi-directional
> communication that is conducted under terms of
> limiting pre-agreement.
it's nice when you can get it.
we do not have it, and will
not get it without further
exam of fundamentals.
> An example would be electronic commercial interchange, where utterers and
> interpreters have a common purpose of exchange, and benefit from an added
> degree of clarity through use of an ontological utility. The question in
> such a case becomes less whether an ontology is useful for any and all
> sign interpretation, but how an upper ontology can add to the utility
> of a domain-specific ontology created de novo for this narrow,
> specific, commercial domain.
to the extent that this can happen easily,
it will happen without any explicit exam
of logic or math or ontology or philosophy.
and no suo we come with will actually get
used by practitiners, i know practioners,
they will find it 'easy' to invent each
their own. if we are good for anything,
it must be when all the easy stuff has
crashed into each other, and that takes
a whole nother kind of thinking than the
sort that depends on a pre-established
'harmony and hierarchy' (hah).
jon awbrey
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