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Re: [ontolog-forum] entity: nothing

To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 11:43:30 -0400
Message-id: <46F3E6A2.1060604@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Ingvar and Randall,    (01)

IJ> I do not find Aristotle especially vague.    (02)

Nor do I.  What I was criticizing is the implication that it is
easy to map the various concepts of matter in different versions
of modern (post Galilean) physics to one another, let alone to
Aristotle's categories.    (03)

RS> Actually, the energy of electron / positron annihilation is in
 > the X-Ray spectrum. You don't get to gamma ray energies until you
 > have nucleon annihilation....    (04)

This is another example of the vagueness in terminology, even in
modern science.    (05)

The frequencies define a continuous spectrum of electromagnetic
radiation.  For convenience, various parts of the continuous spectrum
are named by a discrete set of terms, but most of the borderlines
are not sharp, and there are many overlaps.    (06)

The spectrum of very high energy (hard) X-rays overlaps the spectrum
of low energy gamma rays.  In Feynman diagrams, the photons ejected
in any interaction that creates, annihilates, or transforms subatomic
particles are labeled with the Greek letter gamma.    (07)

Examples like these reinforce my claim that it is impossible to have
a unified, formally axiomatized ontology that can cover all technical
fields (science, engineering, medicine, etc.), let alone all the
colloquial usage in newspapers, magazines, and the WWW.    (08)

We can certainly create looser terminologies, such as WordNet and
specialized glossaries for every imaginable field.  Those terminologies
have proved to be extremely valuable.  But they don't correspond to
what formal ontologists call "formal ontology".    (09)

John    (010)


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