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Re: [ontolog-forum] intangibles (was RE: Why mostclassificationsarefuzzy

To: "'[ontolog-forum] '" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "Rich Cooper" <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2011 14:53:20 -0700
Message-id: <3DA7933CD9E14E7F89C855956CF57EF5@Gateway>

Dear Azamat,

 

I agree fully with your statements below.  I have no expertise in that area, so I can only speculate without foundation – but that won’t stop me from doing so. 

 

I have a hunch that what we need is some kind of mechanism that aggregates individual self interests in groups that are optional to all participants. 

 

One way to do so is to somehow have all government agencies be optional to participants, including who pays taxes or fees to support the groups, who gets payouts and services, and who gets paid to implement the government project plan.  In Jefferson’s day, it was called fee-for-service, but now everything is taxed to pay for whatever crazies like Dennis Kucinich come up with. 

 

Criminal behavior (i.e. violent crime) enforcement should not be optional, and should be paid from the common funds.  But all civil legislation, and all charitable functions of government, should be aimed at creating groups of self-interest that pay the way for the group, letting the group act in concert where economies of scale apply.  There used to be lots of charities, before taxes began approaching 90% in the fifties, still over 50% today when all taxes, fees and tolls are taken into account. 

 

As a founding principle, citizen A shouldn’t have to pay for citizen B’s self interest unless A herself declares that it is also in her (A’s) self-interest as well.  Only A should be able to so declare without pressure from B or the government.  That way market forces can be free to operate, even when big companies band together in their own self interests, such as they can without using government force to make their wills obeyed by the rest of us. 

 

Unfortunately, that formulation may not allow for charitable help which government very rarely occasionally provides – at least by its own account of what your representatives claim to be charitable.  The problem with government being “charitable” is that special interest groups effectively define who is to benefit, who is to pay, and who regulates the process while crushing whom with taxes and regulations.  It isn’t charity if A has to pay for B even when she disagrees with the government mandated solution, so she should be able to opt out.  But what about poor B?  How do we take care of the disabled, the mentally ill, children and the infirm aged?

 

I certainly don’t know the answers to that conundrum.  I do know that having one law for fitting all citizens is absurd, and leads to exactly what Jefferson said – that government will grow to fill every crevice with every excuse at the expense of individual freedom.  It clearly has in the US, in Europe, and my limited knowledge of politics causes me to speculate that it occurs in every government.  Wiser commentators may know exceptions. 

 

When one prefers a specific tool (subjectivity analysis in my case), one is tempted to think that tool is the right one to use for every problem, so take my thoughts with a ton of salt, but if we could use an internet mechanism to have each citizen, without being forced, choose how to represent his individual self interest in an internet database, and then have government bound (somehow inescapably) to implement the optional  groups of common self interests for each participant specified in the database, that might be the outline of a solution. 

 

“One size fits all” doesn’t work in government any more than it has in ontologies.  Regulatory bodies not only specify what is solely acceptable, but also that no other path is to be tolerated.  They enforce their regulatory regalism ultimately with guns. 

 

Government, as someone wise once said, is inherently evil (because it uses force to have its laws and regulations obeyed), yet absolutely essential (because we don’t play well together without supervision).  That is why I except criminal laws, by which I mean laws forbidding actual violence done to others, not laws forbidding gambling, prostitution, drugs or other nonviolent acts, or acts without a victim other than the actors.   Everything else should be civilly enforced, by the participants and through just process in impartial courts, at least in my ideal formulation. 

 

But let’s hope wiser heads than mine tackle the problem.  It can’t possibly be that simple. 

 

-Rich

 

Sincerely,

Rich Cooper

EnglishLogicKernel.com

Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

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From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of AzamatAbdoullaev
Sent: Monday, August 08, 2011 1:41 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] intangibles (was RE: Why mostclassificationsarefuzzy)

 

RC: "But it seems to me that self interest, widely distributed among the population, and often at odds with the commons, that should drive the system instead of regulatory bodies....I think what is missing is a full and adequate accounting of self interest."

Egoism/self-interest/self-concern/self-centerness as the concern for your own welfare and desires, be it ethical, psychological, rational or enlightened, appears the cause of the issue you mentioned.  It's widely believed that social orders are emerging form local multiple interactions of self-interested individuals without resorting to any planning. A self-organization, or spontaneous order appears without a central authority/coordinator imposing it's central planning. The real self-organizing emerges from bottom-up interactions, as happens with the self-organizing networks, small-world networks, or scale-free networks, limitless in size. What we see in the big politics is not about self-organizing, but about the top-down hierarchical interactions or interferences, reminding severely limited top-down hierarchical networks, which are not self-organizing. 

So why the free market economy is failing with its "invisible hand" of spontaneous order. A rather simple answer, the elite also has its self-interest, which is fully domineering over common individuals. As a result, the "invisible hand" disregards the general interests of the nation and society at large while at the same time enriching the rich. As we know from the statistics, the crisis makes the rich much more richer and the poor much more poor.

I have to agree with N. Chomsky that this "hand" is not as benevolent as advertised; for: " It destroys community, the environment, and human values generally—and even the masters themselves, which is why the business classes have regularly called for state intervention to protect them from market forces": http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199303--.htm.

Azamat Abdoullaev

----- Original Message -----

From: Rich Cooper

Sent: Sunday, August 07, 2011 9:58 PM

Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] intangibles (was RE: Why mostclassificationsare fuzzy)

 

Dear Richard,

 

Having read your paper, I like the way you formulated the problem to be solved in terms of various groups.  In particular your quote:

 

We use the term ‘ontological’ quite deliberately in that expanded information and

meaning frameworks are generated by people. Thus, people use their innate intelligence

and sense of being to create relationships, to create meaning, and to solve problems. Such

meaning frameworks are not generated by machines but through the use of human

interpretative intelligence (Vines and Firestone, forthcoming).

 

This is an interesting formulation, though I am not familiar with the examples from Australian politics you use to illustrate the principles.  But it seems to me that self interest, widely distributed among the population, and often at odds with the commons, that should drive the system instead of regulatory bodies. 

 

Here in the US, if you have been watching our silly struggle over the fiscal state of the country, you can see demonstrated the two or three major viewpoints to which all parties subscribe.  Republican, Democrat and Tea Party actors hew to only three major value systems.  That is like mapping a fourteen dimensional physics onto a two dimensional paper substrate. 

 

I think what is missing is a full and adequate accounting of self interest.  Specifically, every American (Australian, Syrian, Brit, Frenchman, …) has a unique evaluation of the process.  Jefferson anticipated compromise and balance, and did not anticipate the conglomeration of self-interests into a few major threads. 

 

In an And/Or graph (e.g., IDEF0: http://www.englishlogickernel.com/Patent-7-209-923-B1.pdf figures 5 and 11A) if I use different heuristic valuation methods, I get distinctly different preferred solution subtrees.  Each person in any group has unique values, and therefore the emergent set of heuristics is plural in value systems.  With present systems, the projection of millions of value systems onto a two dimensional regulatory body loses the knowledge needed to solve everybody’s problem.  I think a valuation of each individual’s needs – the three hundred million US citizens, for example – is the missing ingredient of subjectivity, and without accounting for that massive divergence, we are doomed to average out the noise of individuals in seeking a single, choiceless, and history shows incompetent, solution to the single individual’s problems. 

 

We need to look at multiple value structures, not just logic, in how knowledge is represented, formulated, selected, interpreted and conveyed into social structures.  Economists like Milton Friedman, Somebody Hyek, Adam Smith and others taught that self interest and individual choice is what makes the free market work.  Governments are the least free of markets, presently structured, like ontologies, to represent only a single value structured solution to problems formulated by a few special interests, not by widespread representations of all citizens’ interests. 

 

It may be stretching an analogy to say that political graphs are like the current state of ontologies, but I do so anyway.  If anyone still reading this has a solution to that multiply valued, multiply choiced fantasy of mine, I would love to hear more.  But logic alone is simply misleading, and IMHO inappropriate, as a solution to problems of groups of people. 

 

Negotiation of individual transactions by individual choices and values is what makes the free market work, as well as it does or doesn’t, and I have not seen another system level method that even approaches the flexibility and evolving progress that so consistently follows free market expressions of self interest. 

 

Thanks for an interesting paper,

-Rich

 

Sincerely,

Rich Cooper

EnglishLogicKernel.com

Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

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From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Richard Vines
Sent: Saturday, August 06, 2011 4:25 PM
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] intangibles (was RE: Why most classificationsare fuzzy)

 

Hi

 

Because I have followed a small number of the threads of this group over a period and learned a number of things from doing this, I thought I might make a small contribution back even though I am sure I am way out of my depth ……

 

RC: …….., I doubt if I can contribute much more, since I have a very strong conviction that subjective construction is the missing ingredient in ontology. 

 

JS: There are three important issues that are worth discussing, but they should be kept distinct when we're trying to analyze them: (1.)  The technical question about how modal logic is related to possible worlds and/or possible models of the world.  (2). The philosophy of science about the nature of physical laws, and the criteria for accepting a hypothesis as a law. (3) The psychological and sociological issues about how scientists and engineers do their work and reach their conclusions.

 

In this discussion crossing over ontology and epistemic logic (and modalities), I am not sure why there is no reference to the nature of “evolutionary possibility”.

 

For me, there is a need to explicitly take into account a temporal component to this analysis …. that different types of knowledge emerge through time.

 

I have puzzled over these matters for some time and made a first attempt to link them in section 1.3 of first part of this paper (the overarching topic being about regulatory systems not epistemology or ontology). In thinking about this notion of “evolutionary possibility”, I was interested in exploring whether there might be merit in exploring a synthesis between Pierce, Popper (and his idea of “evolutionary epistemology”) Wittgenstein and Peter Munz. Munz was the only student ever to study under both Popper and Wittgenstein. It is clear from his book “Beyond Wittgenstein’s Poker”, Munz carried this as an unresolved burden for a good part of his life and his book has been an attempt to make sense of this early experience in the 1940’s. I was very interested in some of his discussion about meaning making within this context.

 

Subjective construction as “a missing ingredient in ontology” (in the broad sense of the word ontology) is very much alive and well in the discourse of knowledge management and to some extent, the KM world has recently been keen to draw upon Pierce’s notion of abductive reasoning to support the trend towards the uptake of a theory of social constructivism. Whilst I am sure this is a good thing, I think there is a long way to go before prevailing views about KM stabilise – it is still very much an emergent domain.

 

To this extent, I have been very much influenced by John’s advocacy for an “epistemic cycle”. I think this has a lot to offer for those with interests in KM theory and practice – and thus I referenced this in the piece referred to above.

 

This earlier piece on knowledge support systems in research intensive enterprises also made an attempt to integrate the impact of hierarchically complex systems and public knowledge spaces into this mix. These two aspects have some relevance to this discussion. – particularly, this:

i.e. RC multiple viewers of the same sign, each seeing it in distinct ways, and reaching distinct conclusions,

 

Cheers,

 

 

Richard

 



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