William, Good observations. Being explicit about context and the scope of that context is critical. Your short list of possible contexts and entities within such contexts is certainly eye-opening, and it doesn’t even include the notion of artificial intelligences or alien intelligences, which, admittedly have not yet been demonstrated to exist, but are certainly possible to conceive of. I’m reminded of some fairly recent legal battles regarding Second Life and the legal rights of people in their “real world” context with respect to the on-line identities that they created and the assets they developed/accumulated in the Second Life context. And the network exposes all of us to a multiplicity of “real life” contexts/jurisdictions, often unwittingly, as a number of on-line industry execs have found out much to their chagrin. Hans From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of William Frank
Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2012 5:51 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Person, Organization, and Citizens United vs. The Federal Election Commission I too follow Dave's model and extend it:
I think neither human beings nor organizations are necessarily legal entities.
I think that a legal entity is something recognized by some law giving body to be such. Some organizations have no legal status in any law giving body. Some human beings, Tibetans living in Tibet, nave no legal status in the U.S. Perhaps they do to the U.N. or the world court.
I think that either human beings or organizations ***can** be recognizeds as legal entities, with different kinds of rights and responsibilities, based on many factors. So too, can trusts, estates, and *an amazing panolply* of other things that are **neither** human beings nor organizations. The of legal rights and oblications granted each of these kinds of legal entity differ. Perhaps only people and organizations can exist without being legal entities. The other kinds of things are legal inventions.
This is what we did in banking models for some time. It worked well.
I do not believe that the court said that certain non-human legal entities are people (corporations, unions, not goverment agencies) . I think they said that these legal entities had many of the same rights as human beings who were legal entities in the U.S. But, I did not read the ruling, I only read, what, from experience, I suspected were news media distortions.
On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 4:54 PM, David C. Hay <dch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: Whoa!
You've touched on an area that really burns me up. For years now, my models have shown Party which is an abstract super-type that designates either a Person or an Organization. A Person is defined as an individual human being, and an Organization is defined as a group of human beings, brought together physically or virtually for some purpose.
In my world (the US Supreme Court notwithstanding) an Organization is not a Person! The Supreme Court decision (Citizens United vs. The Federal Election Commission, 2010) confusing these two very different concepts has had profound political impact in the United States, and may prove to be the end of the American democracy.
Yes, the distinction is important.
If you want to talk about something that could be either a Person or an Organization, the concept Party works just fine.
Dave Hay
At 02:21 PM 10/3/2012, you wrote:
On 10/3/2012 8:06 AM, Andries van Renssen wrote:
> for me 'person' is not a role. But customer, student, patient, performer,
> enabler, etc. are roles, because they are extrinsic aspects which
> existence depend on a relation with some other role player.
The word 'person' is derived from the Roman 'persona', which was applied
to the masks worn by actors in Greco-Roman tragedies and comedies.
The etymology shows its origin: 'persona' comes from 'per sonare'
(to sound through) -- the lips were usually exaggerated in a kind
of megaphone that helped the actors project their voices in the
outdoor amphitheaters.
The two-word phrase 'human being' is the most neutral English term
for an individual of the species Homo sapiens. Other English words,
'man', 'woman', 'boy', 'girl', 'child', and 'adult' designate
a human being of a particular sex and/or age.
Since the US legal system has adopted the word 'person' for a role
that can be played by an organization, the role aspect has been
emphasized, rather than diminished by time.
To be absolutely neutral, an ontology could use the term HumanBeing
for an instance of Homo sap. Then the category Person could be
used for individuals or organizations that have a certain legal
status in society.
The distinction is important. The character string used in the KRep
is less significant. One solution is to use the URI or IRI as the
official designator, and to have a list of possible realizations
in different languages in the document that describes the term.
John Sowa
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