Re: [ontolog-forum] Fwd: Ontologies and individuals

[William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Dec 23, 2012 at 10:24 PM, Pat Hayes <phayes@xxxxxxx> wrote:

On Dec 22, 2012, at 4:26 PM, William Frank wrote:

Pat,

Thank you for your response.  I am especially grateful to be pointed to Common Logic in a way that caused me to begin to investigate it. I know it is mentioned often by many in this forum.

there are several points at which my example was too hasty, and you found them.  as I agree with most of them, I am not going to comment on them.

>
> if the color of a paint is rose red, the gloss of the paint may not be flat

Is that an axiom or supposed to be an entailment?

an axiom
 

>
>
> a 1 pint square can is a container
>
> containers have sizes, 1 pint is a size
>
> a paint product is a paint from a manufacturer in a container

Whoa. You need to distinguish paint types from particular amounts of a paint. One can might be full of Paint347 but that doesnt mean it contains all the Paint347 ever made. I would suggest thinking of Paint347 as a mereological sum of all the pieces of that paint, one of which is in the can.

No so sure about this. Yes, I definitely have to be able to show that there is a relationship between a kind of paint, like Paint 347, and a particular amount of paint in some container. But saying which is more fundamental suggests a theory I don't find a need for.  I often find that when people can show that two assertions are related by an iff, they feel they must make one into a definition of the other. It seems to me that when an iff is *discovered*, there is no way to determine which is the definiens and which is the definiendum.   And, when a way of defining one thing in terms of another is *invented*, we are in theory territory.

Also, people are going to be able to tell that it is paint 347 even after it has dried on a wall, and this is harder to sum with the wet stuff.

I am learning at this store that products are things that can be sold, and you can't sell paint that is not in a container.  So, a tank car of paint 347 is a different product from a pint can of paint 347.  There are two different SKUs for the two products. 

>
> ***every one*** of these things mentioned, from dented cans to their skus to purchases to colors to being a gloss, except for syntactic and logical particles like 'has' 'is' and 'if' and 'every' seem most easily represented as thingies to me, thingies we give names to,  with the least teaching required, except for people who have to unlearn about attributes and entities etc.

I agree. Common Logic philosophy is, if you can refer to it, then it's a thingie,

Fabulous, I've been speaking in Common Logic for two decades, and did not know it, just like Monsieur Jourdain!
 

and all thingies can play any logical 'role' : they can be thought of as relations or functions (and can then take any number of arguments) and they can themselves stand in relationships to other thingies. They can even be predicated of themselves. There is no requirement to distinguish non-relational thingies from relational thingies.

Right. Its turtles all the way down.

After living for years with the syntactic restrictions of classical GOFOL,

what is the GO part of that mean?
 

using CL is something like running barefoot after years of wearing shoes: wonderfully liberating, entirely natural, healthier, but perhaps very slightly more dangerous.

 But surely more useful for describing the categories and organization of knowledge in a domain of human endeavor. 

Pat

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