Dear Leo,
You wrote:
How
can we possibly understand what you are saying here, if we don’t greatly
share common semantics and a common ontology?
Through the psychological process called “projection”.
That is, we have each trained all our lives to read and understand other people’s
words in our own terms. Notice that when one person talks to another, the
listener rarely understands the utterance in exactly the same way as the
speaker does. That is because the listener has different experiences
which she cobbles together to make her subjective interpretation of the
utterance.
To be plainer about it, we construct
reality in our individual minds to match what we sense, and what we anticipate.
We correlate that construction from components we have previously learned and
stored. Once we have learned a new construction, we can use that as a
component in future projections.
Scene analysis, as you probably remember,
was found in part to be an activity of detecting corners in three dimensions,
and then joining those up to match the observed scene in a familiar way.
Escher’s many drawings of impossible figures demonstrate that phenomenon,
as he meant to do by design. Each corner makes sense to us as a corner,
but we individually integrate the corners into a more complex complete
scene. Escher’s drawings show that the integrated scene might make
no sense in reality, but our perception of the corners fits very nicely for
each individual corner.
I think the same projective method is used
for language. If you have read the web page title “evidence based
linguistics” (I have lost the link, sorry), he paints a compelling case
for conversations being an iterative reduction of ambiguity through passing
linguistic hints from speaker to listener. He thinks syntax is a useful
method for representing concepts in language, but that syntax is only useful in
certain restricted constructions, not as a general method of human language
analysis. Many other components are needed to let speaker and listener
project their individual understanding of the concepts being discussed.
But that does NOT make their concepts
equivalent. Each participant comes away from the conversation with a
unique understanding, most likely a different understanding from the other
speaker. How many times have you convinced someone of your point of view
in a single conversation? I suggest it is a relatively rare event
compared to the number of conversations about similar subjects you may have had
with the same person.
That’s my theory, anyway, until more
evidence is made available to me. Your theory may differ.
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Obrst, Leo J.
Sent: Sunday, February 19, 2012
10:33 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] What goes into a Lexicon?
Rich,
How can we possibly
understand what you are saying here, if we don’t greatly share common
semantics and a common ontology?
Thanks,
Leo
From:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Rich Cooper
Sent: Sunday, February 19, 2012
12:05 PM
To: '[ontolog-forum]
'
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] What goes into a Lexicon?
Dear Matthew, David and
John,
Matthew wrote:
It is really rather easy to create an ontology of names, what
they represent, and who uses them in what context.
The problem isn’t
in ease of creation, but in consistent use by multiple people. On this
list, we have consistently found that people vehemently disagree on the
“proper” way to model concepts with ontologies. Our history
of finding agreement indicates that it is very difficult to construct
ontologies that many people agree on. Only very, very simple things such
as Dublin Core have found widespread usage.
By contrast,
David’s example of the policy number, which one would expect to be well
understood within the insurance business, by his stated experience, isn’t
so well understood. The problem is with the observers of any ontology; we
don’t all see the same meaning in a given rendering of concepts.
After a lot of thought,
and from years of discussion with well qualified people on this list, I have
come to the conclusion that ontology is simply one way of rendering
reality. Ontologies have not in general satisfied large groups of
observers because every observer has a unique, distinct, and very complex model
of those simple concepts which we throw around with variant lexicons.
The problem is that we
don’t all have the same experience. It is our individual
differences in experience that leads us to think in different sequences with
different observations of the same phenomenon. I don’t see how that
problem can be solved by monolithic ontological terms.
Instead, problem
reduction methods such as top down structured programming, and packaging
methods such as object oriented programming and client server architectures
have made dramatically effective inroads toward constructing large software
systems that mostly work as intended.
I suggest that
ontologists should take the same viewpoint because it has worked so well
there. Instead of insisting on a singular meaning, a singular ontology, a
singular way of doing things, we should be more open to pluralities of ontology
as just another art form that is juggled differently by each observer. In
Chairman Mao Zedong’s terms, let a million ontologies flourish.
Singular ontology just
hasn’t worked out and it looks like it never will.
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT
EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
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- 5 7 1 2
Dear David,
Of course.
As always I revert to my favorite,
oft-repeated example... a life insurance company that found 70 different names
for the core business concept (term?) "policy number." In a
business environment where product lines are bought & sold, systems are
custom built by different teams & packages are bought, the reality is there
will be many (illogical) names for the same thingy.
MW: it all depends what you build you ontology to do. If
what you want it to do is allow you to bring together lots of different names
for the same thing, then there is no particular difficulty in that. It’s
just that ontologists don’t tend to call those different names terms, but
the common meaning they share. You just have to get over that, and adopt the
local usage and carry on. It is really rather easy to create an ontology of
names, what they represent, and who uses them in what context.
Regards
Matthew
West
Information Junction
Tel: +44 1489 880185
Mobile: +44 750 3385279
Skype: dr.matthew.west
matthew.west@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.informationjunction.co.uk/
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3JE.
At one point I entertained delusions that
ontologies would help with this issue (one conceptual label = many physical
labels). Obviously I no longer hope in that direction.