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Re: [ontolog-forum] Sharing and Integrating Ontologies

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From: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@xxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2010 12:50:30 -0400
Message-id: <4C9F79D6.90506@xxxxxxx>
 > Rick Murphy wrote:
 > > I'm working hard to overcome my preconception that Entity
 > > is not only Thing(s), but I'd like a better visual cue,
 > > like Being.  Have any projects favored the term Being?    (01)

The Greeks had a word for it:    (02)

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dpra%3Dgma    (03)

Jon    (04)

John F. Sowa wrote:
> On 9/25/2010 9:42 PM, Rick Murphy wrote:
>> Am I correct to assume that intentionality is the logos that is not
>> depicted in Brentano's tree of Aristotle's categories?
> 
> The Latin word 'intentio' was used by the medieval Scholastics to
> distinguish _first intentions_, which are language about things
> outside language, from _second intentions_, which are language
> about language.
> 
> Both Peirce and Brentano had studied Aristotle and the Scholastics
> in great detail.  They independently adopted the word 'intention'
> for related, but slightly different notions.
> 
> Both Peirce and Brentano were strongly influenced by Aristotle's
> notion of 'telos' (end or purpose) which was a major issue.
> Telos isn't one of the categories, but it's one of Aristotle's
> four aitia (translated 'causes', but with misleading connotations,
> since the modern English 'cause' has shifted in meaning since
> the Greek 'aition' or its Latin translation as 'causa').
> 
> See the quotation below by Brentano.  For Peirce, the category
> of Thirdness includes intentionality as a special case, since
> CSP would consider the laws of physics to involve Thirdness,
> but the word 'intention' would be misleading.  I go into more
> detail about related issues in the following article:
> 
>     http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/rolelog.pdf
>     The Role of Logic and Ontology in Language
> 
>> I'm working hard to overcome my preconception that Entity is not only
>> Thing(s), but I'd like a better visual cue, like Being. Have any
>> projects favored the term Being?
> 
> The English word 'being' can be used as a participle meaning 'ens'
> or as a gerund that means 'entitas', as in the term 'human being'.
> Aristotle used the term 'to on' -- which could be translated to
> Latin as 'the ens', if Latin had a definite article.
> 
> Heidegger used phrases like "das Sein des Seiendes" -- translated
> as "the Being of beings".  But to avoid sounding Heideggerian,
> I would prefer not to use the word 'Being'.
> 
> As I have said many times, it's irrelevant what you call the top node
> of an ontology because its intension (with an 's') is empty:  it says
> absolutely nothing, and it is therefore true of everything.  I would
> prefer a symbol that is as totally devoid of content as possible.
> 
> But it's convenient to have a pronounceable word.  Therefore, an
> technical term, such as 'entity', would have fewer distractions than
> a more common word like 'being'.  Having a "visual cue" would be a
> distraction, since it might suggest something that could be seen
> That content is false for many kinds of "entities".
> 
>> BTW - I tried this experiment tonight as did my daughter. With your eyes
>> closed, try to see the number 1. Can you actually see it, or can you
>> only imagine it ?
> 
> The normal uses of the words 'see' and 'imagine' don't really apply
> to such questions in any clear way.  But the recent work on brain
> scans provides some interesting data:
> 
>   1. The same areas of the brain that are used to perceive an object
>      (by vision or hearing) are also used when a person is thinking
>      about the image of sound.  (These points have been suspected
>      for years, but brain scans have provided much more data.)
> 
>   2. But in direct sensory perception, the initiating stimulus
>      comes from the senses.  A conscious effort to "imagine"
>      something seems to be initiated by the frontal lobes.
> 
>   3. When somebody thinks about an image or a melody, brain scans
>      show that the same sensory areas light up that were stimulated
>      by the senses.  However, the frontal lobes, which tend to be
>      quiescent in perception, tend to light up during attempts to
>      imagine the sensation.
> 
> I don't know whether anybody has done brain scans of people thinking
> about numbers, but I doubt that they would suggest a better term
> for the top node of an ontology.
> 
> John
> _____________________________________________________________________
> 
> Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the 
> Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, 
> and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a 
> content, direction towards an object (which is not to be understood here 
> as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity.  Every mental phenomenon 
> includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do 
> so in the same way.  In presentation something is presented, in judgment 
> something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire 
> desired and so on.  This intentional in-existence is characteristic 
> exclusively of mental phenomena.  No physical phenomenon exhibits 
> anything like it.  We could, therefore, define mental phenomena by 
> saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object 
> intentionally within themselves.
> 
> Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, edited by Linda 
> L. McAlister (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 88-89.    (05)

--     (06)

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