Dear John,
You are still talking about things that are not really of interest to me.
In business, the biggest application for possible worlds I find is in plans. Businesses do a lot of planning. It is basically a process where an organization tries out different ways the world might turn out to try to find one that is good/best for them, and then try to bring that about.
I’m not particularly interested in data sets in different databases, I probably want all my alternative scenarios in one database.
I don’t care about different sets of laws. The same laws are going to apply to all the scenarios.
Possible worlds gives me a mechanism for keeping my alternative plans separate, and to keep plans separate from reality. It is the facts of these plans that are important to me, and having each set of facts as a coherent whole. I don’t see how different approaches to the rules even has an impact on these things.
Regards
Matthew West
Information Junction
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From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: 26 July 2011 14:34
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] intangibles (was RE: Why most classifications are fuzzy)
Dear Matthew,
MW
> I'm still left with the same question: how do you distinguish between
> worlds
> where the only difference is the facts and not the laws.
In any semantics for modal logic (Kripke's or Dunn's), there is no requirement for worlds to be the same, similar, or different. In fact, there are different choices of axioms for the worlds. In axiom system S5, for example, all worlds have the same laws. The only difference between them is in the facts.
One useful application of modal logic is to describe possible updates in database systems. To be specific, let's assume that we have a collection of relational databases:
1. Each DB is considered a possible world w.
2. The laws of w are the constraints on permissible updates.
3. The facts of w consist of all the tuples stored in the tables of the DB plus any inferences derivable from the data and the DB constraints.
4. DB w2 is accessible from DB w1 iff there exists some permissible sequence of updates to w1 that makes it identical to w2.
Note that if all databases have exactly the same laws (constraints), every DB is accessible from any other DB -- because it would be possible to delete every tuple from w1 and assert all the tuples in w2 while observing the same constraints that are used by both.
John