>There is a big difference between having a vocabulary that allows us to
>describe precisely different theories and their effects, and actually
>believing that the models behind those theories are a full description
>of the real world. There is no need to make such a confusion. Adam
>Pease has pointed out that a lot of comments about how "one can't have
>one consistent ontology" actually resolve into differences over
>representations of the real world that can and must be resolved
>experimentally, (01)
Wait. The differences that are most urgent and cause the most
problems for ontology are not differences between rival scientific
theories. The fact that nobody has a consistent theory encompassing
quantum electrodynamics and general relativity is a serious matter
for scientists, but not (yet) for ontologists. The real problem that
we face is this. One can take two people who agree completely about
the facts, and agree to use the very same logic to represent those
facts in, and yet they will produce different ontologies. (The
well-known example of how best to represent time and change is the
one I know in the most detail.) Moreover, those ontologies can be
formally inconsistent with one another. One cannot simply merge
together sentences from two such ontologies and expect to get a
sensible result. There are no *experiments* to resolve such
ontological differences, since the two authors agree about the
empirical facts; but one (for example) insists that there are two
distinct ways of existing in time, while the other treats these
simply as two (amongst many) ways to carve up a spatiotemporal
universe. The two authors here might be Barry Smith and me,
respectively. The differences are not empirical, but (sorry)
philosophical: in fact, they are *ontological*, in the original,
pre-AI, pre-Web, sense of that word. They reflect divergent,
incompatible, ways of thinking about some aspect of the world.
Differences like this cannot be resolved experimentally; and all the
evidence so far available suggests that to even attempt to 'resolve'
them, in the sense of deciding on a winner, is only going to alienate
a sizeable fraction of the user base. (02)
Now, what should we do about this? All the proposals I have ever
heard boil down to one of three alternatives: (1) ignore it and hope
it will go away (2) for each such conceptual debate, decide on one of
the alternatives and make it the single standard (somehow: perhaps by
compulsion, as some military funders seem to assume; perhaps by
commercial pressure, as PatC seems to suggest) or (3) find ways to
translate between them as they arise. I strongly believe that the
only long-term feasible method is (3), and we have made considerable
progress along these lines, enough to suggest that the translations
are always possible and often fairly easy, once one approaches the
problem in a pragmatic frame of mind. If all ontologies were written
in IKL, we could definitely do the translations for almost all of the
problems I aware of. In particular, option (2) simply isn't going to
work. People will simply not agree on what is the single right way to
write ontologies. Nor should they have to: there is absolutely no
reason why they should. Any attempt to enforce (or otherwise
persuade) the entire planet will only produce the kind of
interminable semi-philosophical debates that we are already having. (03)
Now, it may well be that the protagonists of a single Correct Upper
Ontology (an idea which I cannot help but find amusing, sorry) are in
fact doing the same thing in a different terminology. The work
involved in translating between rival conceptual frameworks is
probably essentially the same as that involved in fitting them into a
single coherent overarching framework. In both cases one needs to
worry about consistency, mappings between different ways to express
things, and so on. So it may well be that at a technical level we do
not really disagree. But the great advantages of taking the third
position are less technical than social. It allows people to use the
conceptual framework they are most comfortable using (for whatever
reason). It distributes the effort, in that ontologies which agree
can work together while waiting for translators to other ontologies,
probably written by different people. It takes advantage of the Web.
It can support an 'ontology open source' model, with all its
advantages of flexibility and immediate 'swarming' of effort on
urgent problems. And finally, it requires no organization or massive
Manhatten-project scale funding or management effort. The world will
just do it, as needed, and the global network of ontologies will in
fact get created. It is already starting to happen. (04)
Pat (05)
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