On Feb 2, 2010, at 3:54 PM, Patrick Cassidy wrote: (01)
> A couple of clarifications:
>
> [JS] >
>> What I was trying to say is that terms specified by imagery are
>> family
>> resemblance terms that cannot be defined by necessary and sufficient
>> conditions.
> Agreed - they cannot be defined by necessary and sufficient
> conditions, and
> I have never said and have tried hard to avoid implying that they are. (02)
Well then, you have to give us some idea of what you ARE saying. Let
me summarize so as to reveal my confusion. You insist that there is,
or will be, a clear distinction between primitive concepts in the FO
and others. The others will be 'defined in terms of' the primitives.
But this does not mean by necessary and sufficient conditions, so it
does not mean 'defined in terms of' as this is understood in
mathematics and logic. So what *does* it mean? Apparently, necessary
conditions are all that will be required in some cases. So, to take an
example, if we have the concepts of time interval, mass and duration
in the FO, as I believe you have suggested, then we introduce the
concept of dieting, and have the axiom that dieting over an interval
implies the ones mass decreases during the interval, if the dieting is
successful, then an axiom expressing this necessary condition might
count as a *definition* of 'dieting' in terms of mass and
timeinterval, say. Is that more or less right? Or would you want to
say that one needs more than just a simple observation like this to
count as a 'definition' of dieting? But how much more? How are we to
judge when enough axioms are written to count as having captured the
essence of a concept and reduced it definitionally to others? (03)
What bothers me is that there are no such criteria, in fact, and that
all you are actually saying is that axioms will get written which are
enough for practical purposes to draw the conclusions that people feel
ought to be possible to draw. But this is exactly the Cyc vision of a
large Theory of Everything, and I see nothing in it which suggests
that identifying this Longman Core of concepts is going to serve any
useful purpose. The theory as a whole is not going to be a
conservative extension of the core theory (because then all those
definitions would be necessary and sufficient; but you insist they are
not. So how does the presence in it of this subtheory make it any
different from any other large, interconnected general-purpose
ontology such as CYC or SUMO? (04)
> Or
> at least most cannot - I am agnostic as to whether some might be
> represented
> in terms of more basic visual primitives. Many ontology elements
> will be
> specified only by necessary conditions, including criteria for
> exclusion
> from a class. The linguistic description will fill in some of the
> understanding (for programmers) that the logic cannot supply,
> especially by
> pointing to known instances. This will still leave open some
> potential for
> varying use, so absolute accuracy is not guaranteed. But this
> system will,
> as best I can tell, enable a broad semantic interoperability (05)
You keep saying this. I simply do not believe it. Can you show HOW the
existence of this ontology will enable any kind of semantic
interoperability? BTW, I have made similar challenges to the SUMO, and
have never been given a satisfactory reply. People seem to simply take
it as obvious that ontologies create interoperability, but they do
not. At the very least, interoperability requires code to be written.
Code, unlike ontologies, actually does something. Where exactly does
the ontology become involved? Can you sketch a scenario? (06)
> (not mappings
> constructed for specific cases) more accurate than any other I have
> see
> proposed. I have never used the term "necessary and sufficient
> conditions"
> and have avoided the term "definition" except for dictionary
> definitions, so
> as to avoid giving a misleading impression of the nature of the
> logical
> descriptions (or specifications).
>
>> MW> Yes. But for interoperability (Pat's interest) that is not
>> a problem. You only need to pick one. You then only need to be
>> able to
> map other views into and out of it. Alternatively, if you want to
> capture
> many different viewpoints, you can adopt John's Lattice of Theories.
>
> [JS] I agree with Matthew's point, but I suspect that those
> alternatives are
> not the ones Pat was proposing. The first one, as I interpret it,
> adopts a
> fixed ontology and legislates it for a specific group of
> applications. Any
> application that is added to the group must have some mapping to that
> ontology. I agree that alternative can be valuable for a specific
> range of
> applications.
>
> Well, I was in fact proposing that different viewpoints can be
> captured in
> an FO - if they are logically compatible and translatable, they can
> all be
> in the FO, but if logically incompatible they would be in extensions
> (which,
> though not technically part of the FO itself, would be maintained in
> the
> same site so as to avoid others having to recreate the same ontologies
> again) (07)
This 'in the same site' idea is so quaint, it should be embroidered in
lace somewhere. Pat, surely you have heard of the Web? (08)
BUt to get down to details. Take the basic ideas of timepoint,
interval and duration. What is the FO for these? Is the timeline dense
or discrete? They are logically incompatible, so either one cannot be
in the FO. So we simply make no assumptions as to continuity or
density. Are timepoints totally ordered? SOme axioms (eg the situation
calculus) say no, so we cannot assume that. Do intervals meet at
points? Many theories assume so, but there are some that refuse to
even contemplate points in this exact sense; so we cannot assume that
the temporal FO allows Allen-interval-relation reasoning. What we are
left with in the temporal FO is that time-intervals can be partially
ordered and might be contained on one another. Not very much, this,
for a temporal FO. Not enough, for example, to even support simple
calendar applications, which would have to all be in extensions. In
fact, just about anything useful at all will have to be in some
extension, and they are all logically incompatible with one another.
So we have a variety of temporal ontologies, all mutually
incompatible. Which is exactly what we have had for the past decade or
more. (09)
I see absolutely no reason why this pattern will not be repeated over
and over again. (010)
Pat H. (011)
> , which would form a lattice (or at least a hierarchy) of theories
> " legislates" is a loaded word. The FO and the community that use
> it
> would provide an interoperable community that others may or may not
> *voluntarily* want to interoperate with. If not, they can ignore
> the FO, or
> create an isolated community using some other interoperability
> mechanism.
>
> [JS] I believe that Pat's primitives are the 2000+ words in
> Longman's list.
> But more important than the list would be examples of how they could
> be used
> for any useful application.
>
> I have tried to carefully distinguish between human language and
> ontology,
> but I use the Longman experience as an *analogy* to what can be done
> with
> logic. The words in the Longman list are not the primitives, the
> logical
> concepts that are referenced by uses in the Longman definitions
> (there can
> be more than one per word) are the starting set of presumptive
> primitives.
> (Actually Guo has shown that some of the 2148 words can themselves be
> defined by a smaller set) I take the concepts referenced by the LDV
> as a
> good start, but they may not be enough. There are among other
> things some
> abstract ontology elements that are not lexicalized in English, and
> many
> relations that are not labeled by single words. Rules specifying the
> meanings of the relations are part of the logical specifications of
> elements
> in the FO and are not represented by individual words.
>
> Pat
>
> Patrick Cassidy
> MICRA, Inc.
> 908-561-3416
> cell: 908-565-4053
> cassidy@xxxxxxxxx
>
>
>
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> (012)
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