>Hi Pat,
>
>You can put this back on-line, if you think anyone will be interested. (01)
Whoops, I thought I had. Sorry. (02)
>I suppose I am being a bit presumptuous to assume you are interested :-). (03)
Not at all. (Presumptuous?? What do you think I
have grown into?? Don't answer that.) (04)
>I agree that you can make the logical manoeuvres that you are suggesting,
>but there is another question.
>
>How elegant is the solution?
>Is the proposal just a hack?
>And if it is, so what? (05)
Well, Im all in favor of hacks if they work, both
in coding and in writing ontologies. More
seriously, terms like 'just a hack' convey
nothing useful, seems to me. The case I was
arguing was that any ontological content CAN be
expressed in FOL. Responses along the lines of
"OK, but I don't like that way of expressing it'
(which is what 'just a hack' means) are not
persuasive. (06)
>
>I had an intuition that this was an important question, but could not really
>put my finger on a good argument until recently.
>
>Last year a colleague gave me a book on complexity theory that gave me the
>beginnings of an argument.
>
>The book is really badly written - but the argument is good. I can send you
>the relevant scanned pages if you want - be warned the pdf is enormous. (07)
Book reference and page #s will do. (08)
>
>Anyway, the nub of the argument is this.
>
>When the complexity (complexity theorists seem to call what IT people call
>functionality, complexity) of a tool is not up the task, you need to use a
>workaround. The greater the gap, the greater the number of workarounds.
>
>Now a lot of the work I do consists of trying to spot workarounds, and
>guessing what aspects of the tool (for tool read ontological foundations)
>need to be improved to make the tool sufficiently complex/functional. So
>this seems to make sense.
>
>I also chatted to a few complexity (software) people and they all said they
>could not understand traditional software architects all seemed to try to
>build complexity (i.e. functionality) OUT of the system. This struck a
>chord, as often the changes I was talking about (e.g. multiple rather than
>single inheritance) were condemned by programmers as too complicated
>(happened again last week). OK, I accept the foundation was a bit more
>sophisticated, but it made the rest of the system much MUCH simpler. We get
>order of magnitude reductions in code. (09)
Sounds like what you were calling an improvement
is what they would call a hack, no? Are you sure
you are talking about the same thing here? (010)
>It also struck a chord with the FD of the company I am working with now. He
>reckons that in most of the accounting departments he has worked with in the
>financial sector, on average, between 70 and 90% of the effort is going on
>workarounds. He want to re-engineer the accounting paradigm (I can send you
>my paper on this). (011)
Yes, do. (012)
>
>I accept that I cannot now easily define what a workaround is, but most
>people can sense where there is one. My question really is whether this is
>happening in some on the logical manoeuvres you are making. Not claiming to
>always know the answer - just raising the question. (013)
Well, Im not sure what an ontology workaround
would be like. The danger I can see is that
anything at all complicated is condemned as a
workaround or a hack, without saying what it is
that one supposed to be working around exactly.
Is making the distinction between a lake (same
body of water from day to day even though every
pint of water is replaced by river flow in about
three days) and a particular 'piece' of water
(which is dangerous to drink because
contaminated, say) "just a hack", or is it a
genuine ontological distinction? It sure *feels*
like the latter. (014)
Its true, often there are alternative ways of
expressing something and no clear reason to pick
one over the other. Maybe that is the sign of a
"hack", ie its being arbitrary? (015)
Pat (016)
>
>Regards,
>Chris
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Pat Hayes
>Sent: 16 March 2007 16:47
>To: [ontolog-forum]
>Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] The Relation Between Logic and Ontology in
>Metaphysics
>
>>... one could adopt a description-logical style
>>of expression and distinguish between mere
>>logical predication (F a) and natural-kind as a
>>special relation of class membership (Kind a F),
>>perhaps with an axiom which relates natural kinds
>>to their weaker (merely extensional) associated
>>predications:
>>
>>(forall (x y)(if (Kind x y)((propertyOf x) y) )
>>
>
>Sorry, should be
>
>(forall (x y)(if (Kind x y)((propertyOf y) x) )
>
>Pat
>
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