PatH: (01)
One issue in parthood as often used has been problematic for me: if it is
true in mereology that:
> If we are talking about
> physical objects (the usual case) then it can be described as: if you
> were to draw a tight spatiotemporal boundary around B, A would be
> wholly included inside that boundary. So if a lock is part-of a door,
> and a door is part-of a house, then yes, that lock is part-of that
> house, because the door is inside the house-boundary and the lock is
> inside the door-boundary.
>
IF we have a physical object (e.g. me) and at some time t a neutrino is
passing through that object (me) so that it is enclosed within the convex
hull of the physical object, does it follow that the neutrino is part of me
at that time? If so, it complicates the logical description of real
physical objects. (02)
PatC (03)
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA Inc.
cassidy@xxxxxxxxx
908-561-3416 (04)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-
> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Pat Hayes
> Sent: Monday, May 20, 2013 1:36 PM
> To: doug@xxxxxxxxxx
> Cc: [ontolog-forum]
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] What is the role of an upper level
> ontology?
>
>
> On May 20, 2013, at 10:22 AM, doug foxvog wrote:
>
> > On 19 May 2013 07:26, Hassan Aït-Kaci wrote:
> >> On 5/19/2013 1:43 AM, jmcclure@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> >
> >>> Could you provide example of a nontransitive part relation
> >
> >> A sport team is part of a sport club. A club is part of a sport
> federation
> >> if it has at least one team all of whose members are professional
> players.
> >> So a sport team may be part of a club, but not part of a federation.
> >
> >> --
> >> -hak
> >
> > On Sun, May 19, 2013 06:26, Matthew West wrote:
> >
> >> This is conflating two things:
> >>
> >> a) Membership of a club to a sports federation, and of a player
> to a
> >> sports club
> >
> >> b) Whole-part.
> >
> >> I would argue that it is the membership relation that is not
> transitive
> >
> > So subOrganizationOf is a specialization of partOf which is not
> transitive.
> > (subOrganizationOf GaithersburgMD StateOfMaryland)
> > (subOrganizationOf StateOfMaryland UnitedStatesOfAmerica)
> > (subOrganizationOf UnitedStatesOfAmerica UnitedNations)
> > (not (subOrganizationOf GaithersburgMD UnitedNations)
> >
> >> but that it is quite reasonable to create a mereological sum
> >> of the players of the clubs that are members of a sports club
> >> and of a sports federation, and that this is transitive.
> >
> > OK, one can create a transitive partanomic relation that has
> something
> > to do with the non-transitive partanomic relation suggested. But the
> > meaning of such a relation seems like it might be tricky to describe
> > since the relationship between individual team members to their
> > teams is different from their relationship to the club that their
> team
> > is a member of and still different from the relationship that they
> have
> > to the federation of clubs.
>
>
> Matthew is quite correct, and mereology is not particularly tricky to
> describe. But you do have to actually learn what it is that it is
> talking about. Mereology - the ontology of parthood - is concerned with
> the relation being-a-part-of, which is a rather particular relation,
> and cannot be understood by just making vague analogies to how people
> might express themselves in casual English conversation.
>
> Mereology (which was originally conceived as an alternative to set
> theory, a foundational theory for mathematics) thinks of the world as
> made up of lumps of anonymous stuff, and the basic relation between
> these lumps is parthood. A is part of B when, if you "take" all of B,
> you must "take" all of A with it. (It does NOT mean, you would say "A
> is part of B" in normal idiomatic English.) If we are talking about
> physical objects (the usual case) then it can be described as: if you
> were to draw a tight spatiotemporal boundary around B, A would be
> wholly included inside that boundary. So if a lock is part-of a door,
> and a door is part-of a house, then yes, that lock is part-of that
> house, because the door is inside the house-boundary and the lock is
> inside the door-boundary.
>
> One might object, but the world is not made of lumps of anonymous stuff:
> there are other kinds of things, and in any case the lumps have
> properties, and roles and names, etc.. But mereology does not deny this,
> of course: it simply ignores it when describing parthood. Or, one might
> object, but that is not what *I* mean by 'part of'. Fine: your notion
> is one relation, and mereological parthood is, apparently, a different
> relation.
>
> Take the team/club example. It seems obvious to me that a team member
> is indeed a mereological part-of the team, at least if we ignore
> temporal extents (We might have to say, the temporal part of the member
> during the time interval that the team exists, is part-of the team.) It
> is far less obvious that the team is part-of the club; indeed, that
> seems like a category mistake. (Does a club have a spatiotemporal
> extent?) And it is surly not true to say that a club is part-of a
> federation. I don't see a federation as being a mereological whole. So,
> part-of is indeed transitive, its is easy to describe, and it has
> nothing much to do with federations. That all seems pretty obvious to
> me. Next question?
>
> Pat Hayes
> ------------------------------------------------------------
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>
>
>
>
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