Re: [ontolog-forum] Universal Basic Semantic Structures

[Chris Menzel <chris.menzel@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 7:02 PM, William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I agree with all you say below.

Of course I don't think that there is a "conspiracy"  of a scientific elete. 

But I do think that scientific culture make group consensus hard to buck.

My point was that, in the case of first-order vs second-order, there is nothing to buck. There are very good reasons why far greater attention is paid to first-order PA. It is of course true that there many cases in the history of science where an ossified orthodoxy was an impediment to progress.

I do think that there is a cultural move toward eliminating anything that is not simply mechanical, such as natural types, and many other similar things.

Well, I guess I just don't see that, partly because I'm not sure what a "cultural move toward eliminating anything that is not simply mechanical" means. (Not that I want to know, at the moment, anyway...)

 I just don't think the effect of this, given this growing mechanistic view, is good.  For example, I think that an ontology should express a **problem space**, separate from the solution space that a computer can deal with.

I'm not sure what a problem space is. I do think that the first job of an ontology is to capture relevant truths about a given domain in a sufficiently expressive language independent of computational considerations, which sort of sounds like what you have in mind.

-chris

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