Avril made a good point which seemingly missed the formal logicians' ears:
''Now we must separate ontological truth and truth about accidental things
in nature'. (01)
To explain the point, Ontological truth is the relationship (agreement,
conformity, correspondence, mapping) between reality and the mind. Unlike
the truths of mathematics and formal logics, which are purely formal and
without any reference to real meanings, ontological truths are purely
substantial marked with direct reference to real existence. (02)
Consequently, the task of ontology is to produce the truest fundamental
explanatory schemas of all reality, giving the primal rules of all special
truths. According to Aquinas, truth is defined as an equation (agreement,
correspondence) between the mind (intellect, thought, cognition) and reality
(being, thing, entity), where the nature of things or the intellect may be
alternatively the measure and rule of each other. Although the truth as a
relative entity can reside both in the mind and in the real world, the truth
in the intellect (as logical truths) can not be the cause of the truth in
things (as ontological truths); for the truth or falsity of the statement
(that somebody is) first depends on the fact of the somebody's being or not
being. The ontological verities as the basic laws of reality occupy the
highest level in the hierarchy of the kinds of truth: mental, logical,
mathematical, semantic, verbal, scientific, empirical as well as moral,
ethical, esthetic, and religious. A case of religious truth is the
invocation, "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger",
falling into the inclusive ontological statement, "There is no Entity but
Being and Relationship is its agency".
The explicit cases of ontological truths admitted by modern sciences are as
follows: (03)
1. there are things or (entities) in the world; (04)
2. all things have parts and properties; (05)
3. everything changes with respect to properties; (06)
4. the world and its entities can be in different states; (07)
5. things exist in various relationships with each other; (08)
6. there are changes in which substances participate; (09)
7. changes (or events) exist as causing other changes; (010)
8. time and space are sorts of relationships; (011)
9. causality is the basic mechanism of the world changes; (012)
10. the world is organized into several levels: physical, chemical,
bilogical, cognitive, social, and informational. (013)
So the quest of underlying real truths, universal and necessary, is the
ultimate goal of fundamental ontology and ontological theories, aimed to
uncover the general knowledge and fundamental laws applicable to all reality
and its basic levels, parts, and domains: natural, psychological, social,
technological, and informational. When applied to information sciences,
computing ontology is bridging the real world and the information universe,
giving the dynamic world modeling fundamentals, principles, constructs,
representations, and schemes for building a new class of intelligent
technologies and knowledge systems. (014)
Azamat Abdoullaev (015)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Avril Styrman" <Avril.Styrman@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2007 9:37 PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Model or Reality (016)
> John et. al,
>
>> The worst evils in all history have been committed by people
>> who thought that they had the *ONE TRUE TRUTH* and that it
>> was their *DUTY* to inflict their conceptualization of the
>> *TRUTH* on everybody else.
>
>> Science is the search for truth, but the best it can ever do
>> is to give us better and better approximations. And *every*
>> other field is in much, much worse shape than science.
>
> Now we must separate ontological truth and truth about
> accidental things in nature.
>
>> I'll accept the point that reality is one.
>
> If we start to talk about truth, I think that the above statement
> is the first thing that has to be accepted as an axiom, along with
> the law of contradiction. If these are not accepted, then anything
> goes, and sentences loose their meaning.
>
> And isn't that part of the objective one truth that *should* be
> inflicted on everybody? Suppose that this was taught for every
> student in every university. Can you see anything wrong in it?
> I can't. Of course it would cause some counter reactions and there
> are always people who seek continental and poetic 'other side'.
>
> And soon after the first stages, the ontology gets more complex
> with the questions about the nature of infinity, and related
> questions concerning various mathematical/logical theories.
>
> Usually people trust science, and usually people think that
> mathematics is the most secure of all sciences. But mathematics,
> at least the foundational questions, are not any more secure
> than philosophical ontology. In practice, they are a matter of
> faith and style (of course they should not be), and are
> entangled from the beginning until the end.
>
> It is a challenging task to find commensurable means for
> evaluating the fitness of mathematical theories, but I have a
> very strong intuition that things have got out of hands some
> areas of foundational mathematics.
>
> ''But it is not hard to assume any random hypothesis and spin
> out a long string of conclusions.'' Aristotle, Metaphysics,
> book 14, chapter 3.
>
>
>> The point I was addressing, in the notes to Pat C. and Azamat,
>> is that there is no such thing as perfect knowledge of anything,
>> and all of our theories of science are, at best, approximations.
>> Even in physics, we must deal with a very large collection of
>> mutually inconsistent, ad hoc, approximations, and every other
>> empirical subject is in even worse shape.
>
> As a case example, we can prove this with the two mentioned
> axioms. If somebody knows everything of the whole world,
> that one knows how he knows how he knows how he knows, ad
> infimum. And this is impossible for a finite being, because a
> finite being cannot have infinitely many mental states.
>
> And here also comes the matter of opinion in logic. Somebody
> can claim that the chain is convergent, and then make it a
> 'contraction out of contradiction'.
>
> Avril
>
>
>
>
>
> "[ontolog-forum] " <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
>
> Lainaus "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
>
>> Azamat,
>>
>> That statement is the worst possible nonsequitur:
>>
>> AA> Reality is one as its true representation. Otherwise,
>> > you will have just defective systems with ''different
>> > conceptualizations''.
>>
>> I'll accept the point that reality is one, but if we have
>> learned anything over the past several millennia, it is that
>> no finite mind can ever have an absolutely true representation
>> of everything -- or even of any significant part.
>>
>> Science is the search for truth, but the best it can ever do
>> is to give us better and better approximations. And *every*
>> other field is in much, much worse shape than science.
>>
>> The worst evils in all history have been committed by people
>> who thought that they had the *ONE TRUE TRUTH* and that it
>> was their *DUTY* to inflict their conceptualization of the
>> *TRUTH* on everybody else.
>>
>> The 20th century was filled with disasters caused by people
>> trying to ram their conception of the truth down other people's
>> throats. And the 21st is starting off on an even worse footing.
>>
>> Whenever anybody thinks he or she has absolute truth in his
>> or her hands, you have found a truly depraved being who would
>> inflict untold evil upon the world -- unless stopped.
>>
>> I won't mention any, but I'm sure we can all find examples.
>>
>> John
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
> --
> Always forward towards the supreme maxim of scientific philosophizing
>
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