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Re: [ontolog-forum] Presentism (was Re: Ontology of Rough Sets)

To: Pat Hayes <phayes@xxxxxxx>, "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Ronald Stamper <stamper.measur@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2011 11:03:43 +0000
Message-id: <0977AD8B-CB56-420C-8078-EDE96A5C3C66@xxxxxxxxx>
Dear Pat,

I refer to your message, below.

There's no contradiction.  Using signs to represent (by signifying rather than denoting) things in the past does not entail any claim about the existence of those things: for example, the characters and events in the novel I'm now reading and in last week's news reports.  

Despite the non-existence of the things represented, those presently existing signs are useful to me now.  Past, future, distant and fictional things are semiological constructs available to me now.

The fictional behaviour of Mr Pecksniff and Martin Chuzzlewit help me to adjust my evaluative norms and the reports about the overthrow of the Tunisian dictator read by my Egyptian friend cause him to alter his political behaviour.  

Indeed, you responded on 3 Feb to a MESSAGE I wrote on 27 Jan, not to me.  I may have died.  You, the highly intelligent, courteous scientist of whom I have an image may not exist but I'm willing to believe you exist because of the messages I get from the ontolog forum and especially from some of its other participants whom I remember meeting etc, making up a convincing theory to that effect that you are not a fiction.  

You would like me to live, as you claim to do, "in a world with a past and a future" but I resist because I am only confident that I live in a present filled with signs that provide vivid images and accounts that I can  TALK OF as a past or a future realisiing that I cannot visit them. 

I loose nothing by being a presentist but I gain the discipline of having to take less for granted and, as an information systems engineer, having to examine more thoroughly the information I use and the grounds on which its authority stands.

Also as an IS engineer I gain insight into a very different kind of ontological structure, one that helps me to construct more robust systems.

Regards,

Ronald
 
 
On 3 Feb 2011, at 09:13, Pat Hayes wrote:


On Jan 27, 2011, at 7:00 AM, Ronald Stamper wrote:

The only things deemed to exist in a presentist ontology (metaphysical sense) exist now.  The present is no prison because we now have signs that stand for things we wish to know about in the past and future.  

Sorry, you just contradicted yourself. If the (present) signs stand for things in the past and future, then the use of those signs claims that those things in the past and future exist. To use a sign to refer to something is to claim that the thing being referred to does in fact exist. But if you are being a presentist, those things not in the present do not exist. 

You want to be a presentist, but also refer to things not in the present. That is having your cake and eating it. 

Presentism, I contend, provides a valuable discipline for engineers of information systems because that's the kind of world we deal with.

I live in a world with a past and a future. Which, to give just one example, is why I can respond on the 3 Feb to a message you wrote on 27 Jan.

Pat


Ronald


On 26 Jan 2011, at 21:49, Tara Athan wrote:

While admittedly not bothering with the details of how it would be implemented, presentism strikes me as a temporal reference frame with origin = now, rather than origin =  big bang or  January 1st, 1970, or ...
Geographers get accustomed to dealing with multiple spatial reference frames, I don't see why we can't accept multiple temporal reference frames as well. The key is to specify what reference frame you are working in (another sense of context for Pat Hayes list?) and have invertible, well-posed transformations for lifting knowledge between them. A simple shift in time seems trivial compared to the gymnastics we go through to convert between WGS84 and UTM NAD83.

May I suggest an example I consider more apropos (than databases) as a source with a presentist reference frame? : real-time data services.

Tara

PS. And speaking of context, may I suggest another thread?  While I take great pride in having a role in stirring up the hornet's nest with our original rough set discussion, that subject line is no longer very informative ...

Rich Cooper wrote:
Further agreed.

Knowledge can be modeled as timeless, but the intuitive notion of learning
expects knowledge to increase with experience.  The generally accepted rule
of thumb is that efficiency increases by 20 to 30 percent for every doubling
of experience.  Therefore knowledge does, in fact, increase with the
learning individual.  

So any timeless model will have to have projections of the timeless
individuals onto useful classes of present individuals otherwise filtered
into the context.  Whether the context can be modeled as timeless is a
completely different question, and just as complex.  

-Rich
 
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ronald Stamper
Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2011 12:40 PM
To: [ontolog-forum] 
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontology of Rough Sets

Agreed!

Ronald

On 26 Jan 2011, at 12:44, John F. Sowa wrote:

  
Ronald and Pat,

There is no such thing as a single, ideal ontology that captures
every useful way of looking at everything from every possible
perspective and granularity for every purpose.

There are many different theories of contexts, situations,
and situated communicating and interacting agents.  Those
systems, theories, and implementations are valuable and
efficient for many kinds of purposes.  In fact, they reflect
the way people happen to be situated in some finite chunk
of reality from one moment to the next.

But other representations are useful for different applications,
and there are systematic ways of converting one to the other.
In particular, it's important to communicate with situated agents
in terms of the situation in which they are operating.

When an accident is imminent, you don't want to send a driver
(or the car) a fully-qualified 4D specification.  You just want
to say "STOP!"

Fundamental principle:  Any single uniform universal representation
is guaranteed to be awkward, inconvenient, or inefficient for a huge
number of critical applications.

John



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Owner, Athan Ecological Reconciliation Services
tara_athan at alt2is.com
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