OK, I've read all the way down. Now, let me respond. First,
OK y'all have described your system quite tightly and thoroughly, which is
good. But you are also stuck in a cul-de-sac, apparently paying no attention to
the rest of the world, which is not good. You don't understand RDF and RDFS,
which maybe isn't itself very important but I fear may be only a symptom of a
deeper malaise.
[MW] Actually Ian is pretty good at the techy stuff, even if he
does not explain it in standard philosophical terms.
You mis-use established terminology ("individual"
here being the worst culprit: that isn't what everyone else means by
"individual".
[MW] That’s a bit vacuous. There is hardly any word that
does not have a large number of meanings, and at least this is one of the meanings
that individual has been used for.
For example, the number three is an individual, but not one
of yours.)
[MW] Well it doesn’t have a spatio-temporal extent does
it? I agree they are missing numbers, but they do not have to be called
individuals, whatever they are.
Just generally, you appear to not know about basics like the
distinction between syntax and semantics, what 'extensional' means, the
difference between actual and possible, and so on. Look, I'm not meaning to
criticize or pull rank here, just letting you know that there is a big
ontological world out there, and before suggesting that your brand-new minor
variation on a theme by Aristotle is the final answer to the world's problems,
it might be a good idea to try reading a little more about what others have done.
You aren't the first people to invent a formalized system for representing
general knowledge, and you ought to at least know a little bit about what was
already done. After all, suggesting any ontology as a possible
general ontology standard amounts to making a VERY large philosophical
claim, one that most professional philosophers or ontologists would hesitate to
even approach. At the very least, it surely behooves one to know just a little
about the field in which one is making such grand suggestions. Like knowing
what some of the long words mean, and being able, or maybe willing, to actually
read and understand the specifications of the notations one is bandying
about.
[MW] You realise this is Chris Partridge you are describing as
not well read and not knowing anything about ontology?... Not sure I’d
like to have to trade reading lists with him...
Here's a few questions for y'all.
[MW] Well I’m pretty familiar with Chris’s positions
on most of these, so I’ll give this a go.
(1) Is
Sherlock Holmes an individual? [MW] Yes
One might say he is located in a possible space-time, but not in
the actual one. Do you want to say that? [MW]
Yes
If so, how are the many possible but non-actual space-times related to
one another, if at all? [MW] By counterpart Theory (David Lewis, straight down the line)
If not, what do you want to say
about S.H. ?
(2) How
much extent is required? Is the event of a quantum being emitted by a sodium
atom's moving from a higher to lower energetic state an Individual? [MW]Yes
(How does one kick that?) [MW] Metaphorically
(Ian was of course talking loosely)
Are things like vortices in a fluid, waves on the ocean, burstings into
flame, explosions all Individuals?[MW] Yes
(How does one kick them?) Is an acceleration an Individual? (Say
my truck goes from zero to 30 in about a minute when I set off to work
tomorrow. Is that acceleration an Individual? [MW]
Yes
How does one kick it?)
(3) You
say a type is identified by its members, which I take to mean that if it
has the same members, its the same type. That sounds like saying that a type is
a set. Is a type a set, in fact? [MW] Yes
If not, how do they differ from sets? If they are, are all sets types? [MW] Probably, but I’m not sure what the approach
would be to ordered sets, like temperature or the real numbers.
If not, what distinguishes the type-type sets from the non-type-type
sets? [MW] Well that would be the
ordering relation.
(4) You
say that a type can be a member of a type (which is good, and not
un-extensional.) Can a type be a member of itself? More generally, can there be
circles of type-membership, so that A is a type of B is a type of C is a type
of A ? If not, why not? [MW] Not sure. I
would say yes, but I think Chris is uncertain. He leans towards type theory
rather than set theory (that might impact some earlier answers.
(5) Into
which basic ontic category would you put the following: the number three; the
color purple; the property of being square; the relation between people of being
the natural mother of ; the shape of a face (in the sense in which a
death mask has the same shape as the face it is a casting of); the Krebs
cycle in cellular biology; Moby Dick, the novel by Melville (not any
particular imprint or edition of it, but the work itself); a website (c.f. the
current W3C debates over the notion of an "information resource"); an
email message; the sentences in that same email message; a substance (such as
clay or air: not any particular piece of it, but the stuff itself); a
time-interval? I realize this is a longish list, but since you have your
identity criteria so well defined, you ought to be able to rattle them off
pretty quickly.
[MW] I think Ian has answered these, no they are not very difficult.
Regards
Matthew
West
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