Dear All, (01)
Although my own team’s approach to ontology differs strongly from the
mainstream of Ontolog thought, you may find these ideas relevant to
this thread:
1. Making and maintaining the meanings of signs used by people will
always depend upon human judgement and will always resist mechanical
standardisation. Hence we should live with that fact and put more
effort into improving the intelligence of human communities and less
into creating a generalised mechanical form of artificial intelligence
while still building limited scale, pseudo-intelligent machines. (02)
2. Nevertheless, there does exist a very stable structure across
cultures and time arising from ‘ontological dependency’. We arrived
at this relationship on the basis of an ontology (= an understanding
about the nature of reality) that takes into account how people
construct the world they perceive. One thing depends ontologically
upon others when it can exist only during their coexistence. (For a
little more see parts of the two papers on www.rstamper.co.uk .) (03)
3. This stable semi-lattice structure, serves as a Semantic Normal
Form, for a Semantic Temporal DataBase. Each node serves as surrogate
for perceptual unit with a few essential attributes including a start
and a finish for its existence and an authority for the start and
finish, which account for the cultural and temporal variations in
meaning. (04)
4. Wherever other perceiving agents furnish information on which we
base our understanding of the world around us, each of those agents
contributes to some degree or other towards the meaning we associate
with the node. The contribution may be the idiosyncratic choice of an
individual person or it may be defined by a norm that determines a
start or a finish (think of copyright law) and a norm distributes the
authority over the many individuals who supply the observations,
judgements, etc in the conditional part of the norm. (05)
5. Although we cannot standardise meanings, we can track more
carefully the contributions made by different individuals and
institutions. The stable SNF schema supports a logical process of
analysis but that can never be sufficient; analysis of the authorities
tells us about the power exercised by the people who play their
various roles in the fine tuning of meanings. (06)
[6. an aside: The generic-speicific relationships that play a
major part in the ontolog style ontologies have nothing to do with
existence relationships in the ontological dependency sense because
they are cognitive norms, which are themselves dependent on the
judgements of certain cultures, institutions or even individuals.] (07)
Ronald Stamper (08)
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