ONT Re: Modus Ponens

[Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>]

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| And if he is told that something is the way it is, then he thinks:
| Well, it could probably just as easily be some other way.  So the
| sense of possibility might be defined outright as the capacity to
| think how everything could "just as easily" be, and to attach no
| more importance to what is than to what is not.
|
| Robert Musil, 'The Man Without Qualities',
| Translated with a Foreword by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser.
| Pan Books, London, UK, 1979.  English edition first published
| by Secker & Warburg, 1954.  Originally published in German as
|'Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften', 1930 & 1932.  (Vol. 1, page 12).

CS = Carl Sandburg
JA = Jon Awbrey
JD = Jean-Luc Delatre

JA: Ontology As A Way Of Putting Things

    | When you are criticising the philosophy of an epoch, do not chiefly direct
    | your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it
    | necessary explicitly to defend.  There will be some fundamental assumptions
    | which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously
    | presuppose.  Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know
    | what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever
    | occurred to them.  With these assumptions a certain limited number of
    | types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems
    | constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.
    |
    | ANW, SMW, page 48.
    |
    | Alfred North Whitehead,
    |'Science and the Modern World',
    | Lowell Lectures 1925,
    | Free Press, New York, NY, 1967.

JD: Excellent Jon!
    Are you joining me against the SUO crowd?

e-musiling ...

JD: Some of the "assumptions" that, to me, seem questionable and shared by
    most people involved in ontology projects (alas, not only SUO!) are:

JD: 1) There exist ultimately a *perfect* all encompassing ontology that allows
       describing everything, and we have to chase for it however distant it be.

the problem is not thinking it exists ---
the problem is not having to chase it - -
the problem is thinking one's arrived ---
that is the semeio-conscious delirium - -
tbat semes to be the most serious one ---
so augur me one byte shy of an oracle - -

JD: 2) There *must* be for each concept a *true* denomination
       and everybody  have to agree to use it.

I am re-dubbing this as "Aristotle's Heuristic Approximation" (AHA):

http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg07864.html
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg07866.html
http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03284.html

JD: This must be a deeply ingrained desire of the human psyché
    (a need for safety?) because it appears in Confucianism as
    well as in SF literature like from Ursula K. Le Guin.

In some schools of "object relations psychology",
they say that one's primary need is to believe
that one's mother is perfect -- I think that
this also applies to one's mother tongue,
and everything else that one learns
at one's mother's knee.

were you thinking of 'The Dispossessed'?

JD: There is also a funny anecdote (reported by Bateson or someone of
    his bunch, don't remember) about the german speaking inhabitants
    of Tyrol getting angry about italian speakers calling a horse
    "cavallo" where it's obvious the right name is "pferd".

well, that's a cavalier attitude,
but i reckon they call it pferdy.

CS: Nothing happens unless first a dream.

and what happens second ???

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