Rich,
I’ve embedded my responses in your original email below. I hope this helps you (and others on the forum) understand my perspective.
Hans
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Rich Cooper
Sent: Sunday, February 19, 2012 6:38 PM
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] What goes into a Lexicon?
Dear Hans,
You wrote:
It would be great if we had a way to represent the attributes of shared contexts that are actually shared by the participants, and a way to represent the differences in that shared context as seen by each participant’s perspective on that context.
I agree that it would be great, i.e. useful, if we could even identify those attributes of shared context, and terrific (i.e. informative) if we could assign values to the attributes.
Do you have any suggestions, descriptions, or other material that could help identify or positively designate which attributes would be shared context attributes? I suppose there probably are such, but I have not seen material that can be used to enlighten us about them yet. Each writer has a different perspective I find.
HP: my earlier citation of NCOIC’s SCOPE model underscored this last point. It had multiple authors and getting sufficient agreement to publish version 1.0 was a challenge and involved a lot of “log-rolling”. The published version itself explicitly acknowledges this by categorizing the SCOPE dimensions as “emerging” and “future” dimensions for those that had less consensus than the base set of dimensions.
But adding in the organizations to which we belong as part of the background seems to me to be tertiary after the individual’s experience (primary I believe), and value system (secondary).
HP: this is context-sensitive. Companies and other institutions go through a lot of trouble to make individual differences among employees as immaterial as possible to their operations (the exception being companies and organizations whose business model centers on “star power”). When you call Verizon or go to Best Buy, you would generally like your experience to be as independent of the specific individual you meet as possible. The whole field of business process management and quality management revolves around trying to achieve this goal from an institutional perspective. When you negotiate a contract with a company or file a complaint,, the most important context dimension for the individual you are dealing with is that they represent that company or institution. In the example of life insurance policy definitions, the most important dimensions are institutional context dimensions, not personal experiences or value systems. On the other hand, if you are actually negotiating a life insurance policy with a company, your personal experiences and value systems are probably the biggest factors influencing the specifics of the policy that you negotiate.
Certainly our friends and acquaintances have an impact on our thinking. Otherwise language would not be shared, and likely would not even exist since we have to converse with somebody other than ourselves to create language in the first place.
But why single out our business partners? If you mean, in general, any of those people we converse with and share values with, then I agree that they play an important part in our individuation.
HP: If you are talking about computer systems interacting with each other, relatively few of these represent individual perspectives. The dominant perspective and context for computer to computer interaction using something other than html is institutional in nature. Even Facebook and LinkedIn interactions have the scope of those interactions controlled to a significant degree by those respective companies or their business partners. In essence, they provide a significant portion of the shared context in which you are sharing context with others. Ditto for multi-player role playing games on the Internet (arguably, Facebook is such a game J ).
For example, I operate a business of one person - me. I have help from contractors (accountant, attorney, customers, suppliers, etc) but that is as varied as the day is long. My wife, kids and grandkids are important to me, so we share some values at least in the sense of caring for each other. But I find it puzzling to identify what attributes we share. Please explain with some examples if you don’t mind spending the time to respond.
HP: You share a family structure and associated social constructs with some or all members of your family. Some might share your relationship with some of your contractors/service providers. For example, your kids or grandkids might use your Internet ISP when visiting your house. You might have some joint accounts with some banks or institutions. You operate in a certain jurisdiction with certain zoning rules and ordinances or homeowner associations that might affect things like pets, what your family can grow in your yard or the kind of visitors you can have to your house. If you are talking with me in a forum like this, If you are talking with me in a forum like this, your institutional context might not be particularly important – unless you think you might want to use me to get a consultant gig with my company (I’m retired and don’t have one), or with a company I have as a customer or have some other “in” with. Of course, if you hired some employees, they might become “part of the family” in some sense, but not in others. And the “family-owned” business has scalability issues and context-conflict issues (are you interacting with family members as father/husband or as “boss” or a little bit of both?)
I think the most important part is the early experiences we have with family and friends, and that our basic attitudes and motivations are mostly set by those early experiences, only later modulated by our more recent adult experiences, especially the traumatic adult ones.
Could you please enlarge on your ideas? They sound promising, but I don’t yet understand your line of thought.
HP: My experiences are shaped significantly by having worked in the military as well as in small, mid-sized, and quite large companies, and having such companies and government organizations as my customers. And I run a small family business as rental property owner. When I worked for companies and the military I was very conscious of the fact that my interactions with others more often than not was as a representative of the organization I worked for. While my personal actions and capabilities were important elements of that interaction, other people regarded me primarily as representing my institution, and that it was the institution that was committing to the relationship/responsibility, not just me. The differences among organizations was also very enlightening to me. It brought home to me the arbitrariness of frames of reference we use, and how we let these fade into the background assumptions we make without being consciously aware of them (until we are brought up short by a confrontation with someone else who doesn’t share those assumptions and frames of reference – what year is it? In the Mayan calendar? Or the Chinese calendar? Metric or English units? Right side or left side of the road?).
I’m also very sensitive to people making assertions that some position is more “logical” than some other position when the difference is grounded in arbitrary frame of reference issues. For example, in the previously cited example of “policy number” differences, the assertion was made that “the reality is there will be many (illogical) names for the same thingy.” My experience is that while this might be often true, careful investigation usually shows that the “thingy” at issue is only the “same” for one or a few context dimensions – of importance to the person/institution asserting that it’s the same thingy. But the thingy at issue is often not the same along other context dimensions that are important to the person or institution who named it something different. And it is not “illogical” for that person/institution to call the thingy something else when viewed from that person/institution’s perspective. Going back to the life insurance policy example, when dealing with them in a financial planning context, it may well be important to assign different names/categories to policies that are negotiated directly with an insurance company vice policies that are mediated through association/membership in some institution or group. In other contexts, such as reporting total dollar value of policies underwritten by the company to shareholders, it might not be important to distinguish between such policy types.
HTH,
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
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Rich,
I’d like to chime in a bit on this discussion with the observation that some additional factors come into play when two people have a conversation in contexts other than simply trying to understand their respective words from a conceptual meaning perspective (such as in this forum). Specifically, conversations in, say, a business context, or some social context, involve context attributes that influence the specific meaning of words as interpreted by the two participants in the conversation, over and above the different backgrounds and experience sets of the participants. In a business or political context, for example, the company a participant is working for, or the political party or interest group that a participant is associated with will color the meaning assigned to the participant’s words by the other participant. The participants also will have a shared context, such as a pending business deal, or a political issue, that provides a basis for interpreting the conversation correctly without a lot of explicit context setting during the conversation itself. Each participant will have a perspective on that shared context that is usually not identical, primarily because of the group association and associated frames of reference that each participant uses to select words and to interpret the words used by the other participant.
It would be great if we had a way to represent the attributes of shared contexts that are actually shared by the participants, and a way to represent the differences in that shared context as seen by each participant’s perspective on that context.
Hans Polzer
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
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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
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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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
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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.