John F. Sowa schrieb:
> Chris,
>
> Fine. We can all agree on that:
>
> > I certainly agree that ontological considerations might
> > play a role in the choice of an appropriate formalism.
>
> And the converse is also true: the formalism can affect
> or bias the choice of ontological categories and the
> way they are developed, studied, and used.
>
> John
>
(a) Bertrand Russell famously claimed that the dominance of the
subject-predicate structure in everyday language had misled almost every
metaphysician before him into false substance-property ontologies. In
particular, they missed the existence of relations; which in Russell's
formalism become cleary visible by means of expressions such as 'Rab'. (01)
(b) Analogously, I happen to think that the dominance of first-order
predicate logic in the brains of many analytic metaphysiciains mislead
them into false ontologies. They take away the difference between
natural kinds and properties (since it is not visible in 'Fa'), and they
do not allow different modes of existence (since these cannot be seen by
means of the existential quantifier). (02)
(c) Philosophical ontology cannot be read off from any language
(natural, formal, or artificial in some other sense) in isolation. One
has to bring in perceptions and science, too. (03)
(d) Philsophical ontologies such as those of Plato and Aristotle can,
just as little as Newtonian mechanics, be defined as "a vocabulary
together with a specification of the meanings of the terms in the
vocabulary; the specification should be definable with a model theory
and a machine interpretable syntax." (04)
(e) Heidegger tried to show that philosophy went astray completely, when
it started to ontologize the world by means of metaphysical systems such
as those of Plato and Aristotle. His writings are not nonsense but: (1)
time consuming to understand, (2) denouncing philosophical ontology, and
(3) false. (05)
(f) It is no more odd that the term 'ontology' can take on many
different meanings than that more ordinary terms can do so. (06)
Best ontological wishes,
Ingvar J (07)
>
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> (08)
--
Ingvar Johansson
IFOMIS, Saarland University
home site: http://ifomis.org/
personal home site:
http://hem.passagen.se/ijohansson/index.html (09)
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