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Paola,
Yes, you are 100% right: I am
courting trouble with many such choices of words.
Such is the cost of using existing words to
communicate with. But gradual shifts in the meanings of words, even
"linguistical stereotypes" as you allude to, are the stuff of verbal and
technical creativity and any resulting innovation.
So I have proceeded as if my proposed usages,
in due course adjusted by people such as you on fora such as
this, will eventually catch on. I am expecting, for example (to
speculate as to the kind of red-flag-words you might have had in mind), that the
rest of the world will help the "Democratic Web" survive its partisan meanings
in the USA, that the facilitated infrastructures foreseen will help all of us
preclude any "tyranny of the majority" and will also thereby in due course
render "The Mainstream" as co-opted in my story "as inclusive as the presently
excluded may wish" (to quote myself from long ago).
Such confidence, more than somewhat
apparently-premature though it may be, is based
verifiably on the continuity of my software-architectural picture since I
first published on it on the Web in 1996 (and since long before that, of
course), and on the definite convergence with that picture by more recent
architectural trends (okay, as I selectively focus on them...). The end
will justify the means, while even the provocation might possibly have more than
countervailing benefits.
More crucially (if I may risk so loaded a word),
there is nonetheless a more commonly-acceptable - or at least less
widely-provocative - formulation of the greater social end, only it doesn't mean
all that much to most people. That single goal is "to help people
simplify complexity together." The rather inaccessible
abstraction of that epistemological phraseology (Would you go along with
that characterization?) helps explain why I am choosing to relaunch my story to
an ontologist community. You will see how the fictional "top-down
construction" I present in the first post of my planned series explicitly posits
that as its goal. (The construction is fictional inasmuch as such
representations are always ex post facto, as you know.)
You raise the matter of ethics. A wider
justification later of the epistemological goal will attempt to show how it is
in fact "a
single goal in broad and enriching support of every self-aware
value-system" (as I put it elsewhere, in a piece which was well
received by a significant readership I shalln't namedrop
here).
And (to pop less far up the philosophical stack) if
application interoperation and human collaboration - already explicitly the
motivation of my own involvement with ontologies - are to become more
universal, I believe addressing some such epistemological or ontological goal
should help.
Certainly, however, I do believe most unwaveringly
that wider philosophical perspectives, even where they cross the line into
political matters, can help in usefully orienting and stabilizing our
ontological endeavours. You shall be the judge in my case.
So, many thanks, Paola, for the
response! It is efforts such as yours which explain why this planned
launch is intended as interactive rather than one-way as on most web
pages.
Meanwhile, I expect I would be able to give you an
exhausting if not exhaustive justification as to why any one of your mooted
'politically incorrect statement parser and modifier' outputs would not be
suitable here, all things taken into account. So be warned against any
such challenges too lightly laid! :-)
Nonetheless, I do look forward genuinely to any
correcting suggestions from anyone on an ontology mailinglist.
So please keep them coming.
Christopher
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, February 17, 2008 3:49
PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] What words
mean
As
Pope said (Alexander, that is), "The proper study of
mankind is man."
Already, of course, "the Sabbath [as
other ideologies] was made for
man." The Existentialists
also had a word or two to say on the
matter.
I am not going to say anything about the pain that lack
of political correctness throughout history has brought upon humanity,
however, I am sure an application can be built to parse all the politically
incorrect statements that exist on the web and modify them accordingly to
bring them up to current acceptable standards of ethics (else archived them
under 'obsolete' label)
There
will be much recall of that whole scene in the series
of postings I am
working on. (And I hope you will see that as
a promise, not a
threat!)
I hope you manage to address the inappropriateness of linguistical
stereotypes in your posts too...
;-) look
forward
Paola Di Maio
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