Kathryn Blackmond Laskey schrieb:
> At 9:39 AM -0600 6/13/07, Smith, Barry wrote:
>
>> [BS] I hope that we all agree that in major, critical, domains, such
>> as medicine or nuclear power generation a good strategy for creating
>> useful models is to seek to find out what the underlying reality is
>> like.
>>
>
> Of course.
>
> In a couple of decades of building models of phenomena, many of them
> in major, critical domains, I have come to the conclusion that the
> underlying reality of the world we live in is such that the best,
> most useful models of many phenomena are probabilistic.
>
> When I say this, I get nods from many engineers who have been in the
> trenches building models. They want to know about technologies for
> building interoperable models.
>
> But ontologists tell me it is a category error to put probability in
> the ontology, because probability is epistemic and not ontological.
> (01)
This is a widespread but wrong view. Start to read what Mario Bunge has
written about the probability calculus as a purely mathematical calculus
and what kind of interpretations it might fit - epistemic as well as
ontological. (02)
Ingvar (03)
> IMO, is an example of counterproductive pedantry.
>
> Barry, you caricature Tom Gruber by saying he wants to build
> ontologies of concepts while you're building ontologies of the world.
> That ain't so. Anyone who builds an ontology is specifying a
> conceptualization. A good ontologist specifies conceptualizations
> that are as true to the structure of the world. But an ontology IS a
> specification of a conceptualization. It is NOT a specification of
> the reality. Only God can specify reality. We can describe reality
> and act in it, but we can't specify it. We describe reality by
> specifying our conceptualizations of it, arguing over them, refining
> them, and hammering out consensus agreements on them.
>
> If we bite the bullet and admit that ontologies specify
> conceptualizations [of a domain], then it's easy to argue that
> conceptualizations should be allowed to have probabilities when we
> don't have enough information for a complete specification. This
> argument makes sense even if we don't think the probabilities
> themselves are ontological.
>
> Kathy
>
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> (04)
--
Ingvar Johansson
IFOMIS, Saarland University
home site: http://ifomis.org/
personal home site:
http://hem.passagen.se/ijohansson/index.html (05)
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