Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontology is affected by Personality

[William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx>]

Rich,

the problem with this view is logical, because it is an argument about logical necessity, not about emperical observations:
 
The basic problem is that

while one establishes whether

meanings are shared among a group of people and other agents, by an empirical investigation,

one **cannot** establish the statement

'people in a speech community share meanings' empirically. 

This is true as a logical necessity, not as something that could be tested.   Testing itself PRESUMES sharing the meanings of the tests.

else there would be no point in any of us ever writing an email such as these, or asking others to pass the salt.  To try to establish it empirically would be to presupose that it were true.  And of course, the sharing of meanings is not all or nothing, it is a matter of degree, as communities fade into each other.
 

More comments below.

On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 7:43 PM, Rich Cooper <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Thanks for your views, Leo, and for taking the time to record them so clearly here.  I appreciate your offer to discuss and perhaps debate aspects of the positions I take. 

 

My comments are interspersed below, and meant respectfully,

-Rich

 

Sincerely,

Rich Cooper

EnglishLogicKernel.com

Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

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Leo Obrst wrote:

Rich,

 

I disagree. I would say that there is an underlying ontology that we all share (though we may not know it) + additional ontologies which are cultural, mini-cultural, and personal in nature.

 

Re the assertion “there is an underlying ontology that we all share”, I haven’t found any substantial evidence supporting that assertion, but I have found evidence, such as the three articles I mentioned earlier, that I interpret as examples of some observer’s realities, therefore as evidence against that assertion. 

Well, if we do *not* share an ontology that includes a shared concept of evidence, or an understanding that

 evidence is what establishes the truth of an assertion,

then the about statement is simply meaningless, Rich.  

Why, in my oltology, it means "the slithy toves did gire and gimble in the wabes."  And all I need to know that this is true is that I happen to find it so in 'my' reality. 

This is the same logical problem President Clinton faced when he said "that depends on what the meaning of 'is' is." 

Statistical support would be useful, but those articles are the closest to it I could come yet. 

And by 'articles', in my ontology, I find 'the down of any waterfowl'.    I can't find waterfowl down with a URL, so I guess we are ships passing in the night.

 

If you have such evidence to support the assertion, I would appreciate references, in URL format preferably.  I am open to such evidence, though I am aware that my belief against the assertion works against my openness; that’s the best I seem able to do at this point to be flexible. 

 

There are also views or perspectives onto those ontologies which elaborate needs of a community, set of individuals, or an individual.  

 

Whoa!  There is an enormous amount of projection you do in that one sentence.  You have not yet provided evidence – though I welcome any you can provide – to support the first assertion. 

There are, as has been discovered time and again, knowledge based on evidence, and knowledge based on the necessities of logic.  When Leo talks about 'agreement', Rich, he is NOT talking about an agreement with a contingent assertion, but a meta agreement, to speak the same language.  

If you reject that there are such necessities, such as the fact that a speech community MUST share a common understanding of meanings, otherwise they could not communicate, why are you wasting your time trying to communicate?  It is an impossible endeavor, according to your beliefs.  Speech is useless.

 

Then you build another assertion, this one dependent on the first assertion, and again offer no physical evidence from that reality you credited the One True Ontology, all others of which are mere views or perspectives of the same One True Ontology:

Well, there is the fundamental problem.  An ontology is ***not*** "true" or 'false'.  Any more than 1 is the sucessor of 0 is 'true'.  This is simply what 1, 0, and sucessor *mean* in arithmetic.  

**No** definition can be true or false, it can only reflect the shared meanings of the users of a common language, or the meaning *stipulated* by some authority for use in some context.
.

And, of course, meanings change. But, they could *not* change unless their was a community changing them.  

 

 

There are also views or perspectives onto those ontologies which elaborate needs of a community, set of individuals, or an individual.  

 

The “... views … onto those ontologies” recognizes the plurality of views, not simply one view, elaborating needs of a community.  In any community, there are conflicting needs, so the elaboration cannot be initially consistent, therefore not coherent. 

 

But the “…onto those ontologies” suggests that bits and pieces can be instantiated off slices of the One True Ontology as sort of a generic ontology fragment launching mechanism.  Mapping of concepts implies that all observers, past and future, will agree on the meaning of the concepts.  History shows that is not what happens. 

 

Suppose, for example,

 

If humans did not largely have a common ontology, we could never communicate, cooperate, etc. Witness these distribution list messages: we have disagreement, but we know we have disagreement because largely we have agreement.

 

Actually, I must have missed the agreement part, but we have definitely and positively and for the most part constructively debated these kinds of conceptual conundra for thousands of days.  It has been very useful to me, and I hope to many others. 

This is the point, if you did not agree about the meanings of the words we are using, then debate itself would be impossible. 

 

Back to the fray;

 

By and large, we still don’t communicate well,

What is the 'still'? Do you expect the future to communicate better?  As the language becomes more like newspeak?  

but we act out behaviors well enough to use domesticated humans to act out scripts as tellers, receptionists, salesmen, politicians, waiters, robbers, cops, victims, taxpayers, and other vaguely defined classes, that is not really communicating – it is synchronization of the domesticated mechanisms employed by the media because they have been found to be effective. 

The media?   Did people not understand and talk about, and learn from talk, all of those roles, before there were 'media'?

 

So Buyer does her end of the script and Sales Agent does her thing with the plastic, the merchandise goes to the Buyer, and they bark a polite exit for each role. 

 

It takes some serious sit-down time between two people for them to communicate in any full sense of that word.  It seems to have been done, and you are beginning to reward yourself, when you notice flaws in the behavior of the others, and ask why. 

This is a matter of degree, strongest and broadest speech communities are the scientific and professional disciplines. That is what you learn in law school, and in physical chemistry.   This enables us to communicate very clearly across time and space.     Treasury Services banking, etc.

 

In the extreme, a person may develop their own language, but that language by necessity has to ground itself somehow into the things of the world (including fictitious worlds potentially) in order to have “meaningful” interpretations.

 

If someone develops a unique language and never uses it to communicate with others then the only meaningful interpretations are those of the said someone. 

No others ever experience that unique language, so there is no act of communication. 

It cannot be a language, because their is no way to test the consistency of interpretation.   First time I call the moon the sun, the second time I call the moon my cow Bessy.   How do I know I am doing this?  This is my private 'language', and it can do nothing, even for me. 

 

A coherent world (even if fictitious) is needed for world reference of those interpretations.

 

If the coherent world you are describing acts as a model for proposing and testing strategies, then a coherent world is very much desired, but unavailable to actual experiencers of the world as it is currently situated.  There is ambiguity in nearly every designation of an object, classification of a verb phrase, or any other annotation made on language samples supposedly describing their observations. 

I agree, if we were more careful about the difference between ambiguity, vagueness, and indefiniteness.  And moreso, as people receive less and less general education.  People can be very clear when they speak in the areas they are technically trained in -- Emergency Medical Response, typefaces, but *increasingly* incapacitated in general communications.
 

Uncertainty dominates the certain interpretation in essentially all cases. 

 

 

The one which we as observers prefer is based on our own personalities, as per the title of this thread.  Its “confirmation bias” that we use to make our own internal world coherent, i.e. consistent, and complete, and quiescent. 

 

A person could indeed be schizophrenic or have other interpretive/cognitive disfunctions, but one way we characterize these are as anomalous cognitive systems, which means typically failing to cohere and in the case perhaps of paranoid schizophrenia, as establishing a bizarre set of coherent axioms. How can you establish “bizarre” except via reference to some established notion of reality?

 

I establish “bizarre” on my own recognizance, thank you, without recourse to any one else’s view of the same situation.  Then I gather input from others who experienced similar situations and we can compare our approaches to ameliorating the present situation based on past ones stored in our history. 

 

Of course you could object and say that such a description is deprecatory, because it minimizes the individual mind’s contribution or invention. But my guess is that it’s really the individual epistemology that corrupts the real ontology.

 

Again, your “guess” based on prior and standing belief in the One True Ontology (the “real” ontology) already shows a crack – here you need to invoke yet another kind of ontology, and further assert that it has to have some property value “bizarre” without identifying its ancestry. 

Repeating:

 

But my guess is that it’s really the individual epistemology that corrupts the real ontology.

 

How do you distinguish the “individual epistemology” from the “real ontology”? And by “corrupts” do you mean recombines, in a Darwinian sense, to create new concepts by recombination of parts. 

 

A bad epistemology doesn’t invalidate the underlying real ontology; it just distorts it and makes one (the adherent) unable to communicate or, in the extreme, live in that reality.

 

So now there is some kind of metaontology called a “bad epistemology”?  Its some kind of pathogen based on your interpretation. 

 

Personally, I think our cognitive (and physical) systems as animals have enabled us to adapt (and proliferate) to the world because there is a real world we can adapt to. And that real world has a real ontology.

 

I fully respect your right to believe so, though I fully disagree on the basis of empirical evidence available to me at this moment. 

Again, this is a matter of logic, not observation.   If there were no 'real' world out there, why then, when I touch the hot stove, I am as likely to freeze my finger as burn it.  

 

I do agree that there is some model of the world for each one of us, but I do not agree that it’s the same model in each person, and in fact I have just presented anecdotal evidence that people distort their perceptions, and those distortions can be switched off by an ontogenic event, such as the birth of the second child. 

 

So yes, in some ways we agree more than we disagree, but more discussion is welcomed. 

 

-Rich

 

Thanks,

Leo

 

From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Rich Cooper
Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2014 1:25 PM
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontology is affected by Personality

 

Dear Robert,

 

Thanks for your thoughts.  To say that there is ONE objective reality to be experienced by all observers is to go beyond the actual evidence.  We already know that quantum mechanics insists on dualities of various kinds.  We still don’t know how to distinguish wave from particle in many physics problems.  The physics explanation is simply that we are not familiar with the phenomenon at quantum level; therefore we can’t expect it to be intuitive. 

 

But what I am proposing is that, regardless of whether reality is monopolar or multipolar, our perception is focused by our individual behaviors, our learned personal experiences, and our subjective belief systems.  The three articles I cited show scientific evidence that such active interpretation of reality forms our ideation of reality. 

 

Muslims see a very different world than Westerners do.  So do Buddhists, Apaches, and rain forest tribes in Brazil.  My point of interest is not so much in whether reality is monopolar or multipolar as in how humans perceive, control and plan for reality.  Specifically, how we do it differently from each other. 

 

An ontology is not an objective phenomenon.  It is a purely subjective phenomenon that some people think is universally perceived in the same way by all observers.  I disagree.  I have provided evidence (anecdotal only at this time) that different people perceive differently the same situation in important ways.  It is very likely that the differences described in those three articles are just a few of the experimentally verifiable differences among people’s view of reality. 

 

-Rich

 

Sincerely,

Rich Cooper

EnglishLogicKernel.com

Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

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---

From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of rrovetto@xxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2014 9:08 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontology is affected by Personality

 

I don't see what the purported evidence is evidence of.

There is a difference between theories of reality and reality itself. That we can come up with different theories, and that those theories may be influence (or biased) by certain pyschological (or other) factors does not mean there is no universal ontology. (I say this with the understanding that "universal ontology" is in the philosophical sense, basically meaning that there is an objective (mind-independent) reality...and that it is knowable). Now why one would subscribe to a view questioning (or the stronger: denying) that there is a reality independent on minds, I cannot say. But in doing so (at least the stronger), they would negate science itself, and therefore their own mind.

As for natural kinds: by their very definition (or by the common philosophical understanding of them), they are delineations of a mind-independent reality, hence natural. The only change I would make to this would be to remind persons that minds are themselves parts of reality and hence natural.

 

To say beliefs steer (in a strong sense as in determine) perception is likely too strong; I would not take the articles cited too much to heart. The universe itself is dynamically changing, as in mind. One limitation of the entire knowledge representation (and related fields) is that snapshots are (perhaps presently necessarily) used to represent a dynamically changing world.

Respectfully,
Robert

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On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 10:18 AM, Rich Cooper <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Here is yet another anecdotal evidence atom that
the way we individually see the world biases our
interpretations of it:

http://phys.org/news/2014-01-beliefs-attitudes.htm
l

Those of us who have been parents know how
effectively the generations are culturally
separated:

http://phys.org/news/2014-01-beliefs-attitudes.htm
l

Mothers, according to the following article form a
deluded belief that their first child is shorter
than they are, and suddenly lose that delusion
when their second child is born:

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-12-mothers-youn
gest-shorter.html#inlRlv

With this much evidence, can we still consider
there to be a universal ontology of any natural
kind, at the top or the bottom of the lattice?

If beliefs (constructed during ontogeny, as a
slice of reality is encountered by an organism
with a slice of the human genome) steer both
perception and logic, then how could a logical
rendering of a snapshot of one person's experience
be anything but dynamically changing?

-Rich

Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
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