ALL:
Pat Hayes said:
..., I
... cannot help wondering: ... did you actually
intend to say something? If so, what?
The subject of this thread: "What words mean" suggested a thread of
great interest to me. However, the meaning of "What words mean" must be
quite different for some of you, than I -- for I have seen little of
interest or value in this thread.
If this thread was successful at shedding light on something, what would that something be, and who would benefit and how?
Perhaps someone could summarize the main points [of value] so far to put this on track. If that summary has zero or fewer characters, perhaps the thread could stop and we could move on to things of value.
Thanks
Michael
On Feb 17, 2008 2:16 PM, Pat Hayes < phayes@xxxxxxx> wrote:
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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