Re: [ontolog-forum] What words mean

[Pat Hayes <phayes@xxxxxxx>]

At 7:44 PM +0200 2/17/08, Christopher Spottiswoode wrote:

> 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!   :-)
>  
> If I may
> echo myself from my initial mooting of this series (now at http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/2008-01/msg00453.html), "such
> discussion will profit enormously from, and should therefore
> await, the detail I am suggesting I follow up
> with."
>  
> Nonetheless,
> I do look forward genuinely to any correcting suggestions from anyone
> on an ontology mailinglist.  So please keep them
> coming.

I realize that the above was not addressed to me, but I nevertheless cannot help wondering: Christopher, did you actually intend to say something? If so, what?

Pat Hayes

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