Re: [ontolog-forum] Universal Basic Semantic Structures

[William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 7:45 PM, John Bottoms <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Wm,

What happened to the universal called "undetermined". I thought that was
the place where things were put that could not be classified.

It seems that without "undetermined" you get into an ontological bind.
It may be that some entity can be identified by some property or
attribute, but not sufficiently to classify it properly until new
methods are acquired.

That give the tyro explorer time to ask "Mom, what is this?" Once she
provides additional data the classification can be completed.

Sure, "undetermined" is a good thing to have. 

Is undetermined and your example about what we **know** about the category of the thing, or about whether it *has* a category we don't know yet?  "Undetermined" sounds like its about knowledge, to me.    "We need more data to decide."

But let's say we are dealing with something that has never been fully or completely classified before.  We still may know we are dealling with a new animal, or a new mine3ral, or a new weather phenominon, or a new kind of mulit-dimensional lattice. In other words, it HAS a classification, we just want to classify it more finely.   We certainly have to know something about it, to know that there is a thing there to see or contemplate.

-John Bottoms
  FirstStar Systems
  Concord, MA USA

On 9/26/2012 5:45 PM, Pat Hayes wrote:
> On Sep 26, 2012, at 1:10 PM, William Frank wrote:
>
>>   Try to imagine a thing you could not classify at all.  I just can't.  Please describe such a thing you have imagined to me.
> Consider a point in space, somewhere in the room you happen to be in. Make it reasonably near several ordinary objects. The thing I describe is the mereological sum of all, and only, the stuff inside a sphere centered on that point, with a radius of 24 inches, at precisely 10:22 pm on the 27 September 2012, GMT.

>

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-- 
William Frank

413/376-8167

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