Dear Hans,
You wrote
I
also tend to avoid using the term “common” because it is only
really meaningful when one specifies the collections of individuals or
differences across which things are “common”. I realize some of
your words are attempts to do just that, but my experience has been that there
is less commonality than people tend to believe because they are immersed in
specific institutional and cultural environments that buffer them from
different perspectives and frames of reference, and from the arbitrariness of some
of those frames of reference,
I heartily agree! The variation in belief
systems among people is incredibly large, much larger than can be appreciated
by most STEM professionals, who are so focused on our own questions, tasks and
other daily minutia we don’t even get exposed to widespread views. There
is no standard for citizens because it is impossible to describe even our
differences, much less our substances.
-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 Hans Polzer
Sent: Monday, February 20, 2012
11:35 AM
To: '[ontolog-forum]
'
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] What goes into a Lexicon?
Leo,
All good points,
hinging on acceptance that there is a “predominant socio-technical
culture of Earth”, presumably speaking mostly English. While I
agree that this is increasingly the case (more so today than, say 40 years ago,
when I first traveled overseas), there is also a lot of push-back in some quarters,
as a casual glance at the international news might note. I also tend to
avoid using the term “common” because it is only really meaningful
when one specifies the collections of individuals or differences across which
things are “common”. I realize some of your words are
attempts to do just that, but my experience has been that there is less
commonality than people tend to believe because they are immersed in specific
institutional and cultural environments that buffer them from different perspectives
and frames of reference, and from the arbitrariness of some of those frames of
reference, like the year 2012 reference, or the prime meridian, or the bank
reference, if you believe charging any interest is usury. Everybody in my
neighborhood does it, so it must be normal (or logical). It may well be, but we
tend not to ask too many questions lest we find the answers unpleasant or
discomforting (and not just to ourselves)
Hans
From:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Obrst, Leo J.
Sent: Monday, February 20, 2012
8:48 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] What goes into a Lexicon?
Hans,
Some comments below.
Thanks,
Leo
Leo,
I
think the key word in your original reply to Rich was
“greatly”. I believe this implicitly acknowledges that there
will be some degree of differences in interpretation of the semantics of the
respective participants. The key issue is what degree of difference in
interpretation is material in any given shared context. My personal belief is
that the answer is itself context dependent. In other words, the scope of the
differences in shared meaning that are pragmatically tolerable depends on the
context in which these differences exist, and the willingness of the
participants in that shared context to execute a “discovery” protocol
to uncover and resolve any differences that might be material to that shared
context.
[Leo: ] Yes, if people are from vastly different cultures,
say one person is from the dominant socio-technical culture of 2012 and the
other person is a hunter-gatherer in the Amazon never exposed to an external
culture, or perhaps a visitor from Altair IV, then there is probably a large
gap. And willingness to evolve the conversation toward understanding is at
least a minimal pragmatic condition, similar to the usual Gricean maxims. The
participants undertake “conversation repair” whenever they enter
into a conversation, because they may mis-hear, interpret incorrectly (use the
right word to get to the wrong sense intended), etc. However, rhetorical
perversity to avoid achieving common ground is typically a show-stopper. One
might as well talk to the wall.
Using
the earlier example of different meanings of “policy” that Matthew
brought up, the life insurance company context influences the
meaning of “policy”. That context has scope, so policy might mean
something a bit different in a fire insurance or automobile insurance context,
and it might have somewhat different meanings across different life insurance
companies. And in other contexts, such as, say, cyber security or human resources,
policy might mean something completely different. Even in a narrow
institutional context of a single life insurance company, the definition of a
life insurance policy might change with different customer/operational
jurisdictions, like different states or countries, and there might be different
types of policies, and different associations between customers and a policy.
For example, a customer might be a person or a company, with differences
depending on which it is. A policy with a company might be a
“master” policy, with different employees of that company having
“sub-policies” that belong to the context of the
“master” policy. Individual employees might view their policy with
the insurance company as their own private policy, but such a policy is not
same as one that an individual might negotiation directly with the insurance
company, other things being equal, because it is typically subject to the
individual continuing to be an employee of the company with the
“master” policy. So if someone tells you that they have a life
insurance policy with, say, MetLife, the meaning is somewhat different if that
policy is through an employer rather than directly between MetLife and the
individual. This difference might not be material in many contexts, but if you
are discussing retirement planning with a financial advisor, I can assure you
that the difference is quite material in that context.
[Leo: ] Yes, indeed, and I am not saying that there is one
meaning for “policy”, as I am not saying there is one meaning for
“bank”. One may employ the same word in conceptually different
“contexts”. When I say “I talked to you”, that means
something different than if you said that same sentence. “I” and
“you” have meaning, but they index different persons, depending on
the utterance speaker. What I am saying is that the (common) ontology of two
persons in the current predominant socio-technical culture of Earth is greatly
shared. Otherwise how I could possibly understand what you are saying in the
previous paragraph? Obviously there is also expert knowledge, i.e., a quantum
theorist will have very refined, complex notions of quantum theory compared to
me. But I too can learn those. How? By studying the existing things of the
world and the best scientific theories about those things. How is that possible
if there is not a common ontology?
Hans
Polzer
My
theory does differ, I’m afraid.
Thanks,
Leo
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
Tel: +44 1489 880185
Mobile: +44 750 3385279
Skype: dr.matthew.west
matthew.west@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.informationjunction.co.uk/
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This email originates from Information Junction Ltd. Registered
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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.