On Sat, August 6, 2011 23:02, John F. Sowa said:
> ...
> To relate that to ontology:
>
> 1. A statement (in logic or in a controlled natural language) is
> logically true iff its truth follows from the logical operators
> independently of the meaning of the terms in it.
>
> Examples: "For all x, P(x) implies P(x)."
> "Everything red is red."
>
> 2. A statement is analytically true iff its truth follows from
> the meaning of the terms in it.
>
> Ex: "Everything red is colored."
> "If a cat is on a mat, then an animal is on something."
> "If Benedict is a bachelor, then Benedict is unmarried."
>
> Many people are trying to use ontology to define the background
> knowledge that would be sufficient to determine the analytically
> true statements about the terms in their domain of interest.
>
> However, many people (not just Quine) have observed that there
> are many problematical issues. For example, Pope Benedict is
> unmarried, but most people would not call him a bachelor. (01)
This does not follow from the above rules, so why should it be expected?
RULE: bachelor(Benedict) => unmarried(Benedict)
GIVEN: unmarried(Benedict)
does not imply
?: bachelor(Benedict) (02)
> Since priests and other clergy in the Catholic Church take
> a vow of celibacy, (03)
FWIW, celibacy applies to clergy in the Roman Catholic Church,
but not for clergy in other Catholic Churches of which the
Pope is head. I met a pygmy in Africa who was a (non-Roman)
Catholic priest, who explained to me that since he was a priest
he was allowed only one wife. The Russian Catholic Church also
permits priests to marry. (04)
> that makes them ineligible to get married
> without breaking their vows. Some do. But if the Pope did,
> he would create a huge controversy. (I wish he would.) (05)
It seems that the rule for bachelorhood needs to be more complex than
such unmarried(X) & man(X) => bachelor(X) . (06)
> Quine and others have pointed out that the number of such
> problematical issues (07)
I'm not sure if your example is problematic, but prolbematic issues
do arise. (08)
> is enormous for any significant body
> of knowledge. That is an issue that makes many people
> (including me) highly skeptical about the goal of creating
> a single universal ontology that has detailed definitions
> and axioms for specifying all analytical truths.
>
> Instead, my recommendation is to use an underspecified
> collection of terms with very few axioms. For detailed
> reasoning about specific problems, use those terms in an
> open-ended collection of small theories (microtheories),
> each of which is specialized for a narrow domain. (09)
I agree. (010)
-- doug f (011)
> John
>
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> (012)
=============================================================
doug foxvog doug@xxxxxxxxxx http://ProgressiveAustin.org (013)
"I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great
initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours."
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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