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Mike,
Many thanks to you too for the advice (once again,
as you may remember from the SUO list in the year 2000).
Please see my reply a few minutes ago to Pat Hayes'
comparable frankness.
As for the rest of this thread, at the point I
joined it was on the fascinating subject of a good word with which to
characterize the special nature of the web in its entirety. I joined in by
noting some aspects of another dimension to its complexity, namely when seen as
a product of an elaborate social complex system. I took the
opportunity because I thought it useful to begin to set the scene for the
"grasping the nettle of complexity" theme I sometimes use to help explain how it
is that my full proposal (of which more to follow in later posts) will be
successful.
So please do wait and see, though I agree this
thread is not the place for my planned sequel.
For my part, I look forward to your showing me, in
due course, how I might have been more succinct in introducing my very new and
very big message.
Here are some further indications of how big the
message is, and of how I have so far only started scratching the
surface:
You have seen, for example, how I
have already invoked "The Mainstream". As you will see in my later
posts, I am thereby beginning to draw attention to the continuity of my
proposals with many constant and relevant features of human nature and human
knowledge. No radical proposal can succeed if it expects us to change our
"basic" cognitive and behavioural patterns. But we can discard the ways we
have unnnecessarily complicated our lives with poor technologies. So I
shall be defining "The Mainstream", in a very selective way you might say, and
building on it so that we might together better follow the slogan "Ride The
Mainstream!" The slogan is valid in many perhaps surprising ways,
including epistemologically and, though with some critical adjustments,
politically too.
I am even planning for the more permanent picture
as we might together refine and elaborate it here to have its root on
TheMainstream.info website. Then one of its leaves will be on
RideTheMainstream.net, which I am hoping will be where we will publish, and
together refine and extend thereafter, the proposed ontology-based
standards for interoperation. That will include the Open Source of
the basic platforms, for example, and be the root of services for the
automatic verification of conformance of purportedly canonical messaging with
the evolving standard.
All that is just a little intimation of some
aspects of the big picture still to come. Sorry if it merely seems to
confuse and complicate at this stage!
Christopher
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, February 18, 2008 2:45
AM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] What words
mean -- What this thread means
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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