Re: [ontolog-forum] Universal Basic Semantic Structures

[William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx>]

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.

Pat, my point is that when you describe something, you are ipso facto classifying it. That is just what a description does. It specifies the set of things that fit the description, even if that is a singleton.  

In particular, I think you HAVE classified the thing, as something locallizable in space and sherical in shape, and occupying a particular position at a particular time.   this distinquishes it from Pakistan, topology, hurricane Dora, my brother, and many other things that do not fit the classifier you created.    

(Especially if you imagine it, you have to be seeing something in your minds eye. Perhaps you imagine something with a color, or a word, even if you don't know what word.  If there is no description, you could not tell me about it, and I don't even think you cold imagine it.)

But, on reflection, I think my point was beside you all's point.  Because you all are discussing rules for **constructing** an ontology, and one of the rules is, we have a universe of discourse of atomic zero order things, and each of those has to have a classifier that it fits.  So, this is a good rule for the completeness of an ontology, only it is not a rule about the world, where everything DOES have a classifier. It is a rule about how to build a human aritifact, a formal ontology.

Wm

>
> Pat Hayes
>
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-- 
William Frank

413/376-8167


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