Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontological Foundations: was a thread in Person, Boy

[William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ron,

I think that you hit the mark, as I consider the circling controversies about Person, Man, Boy, among all of us with different, unshared assumptions, agendas and knowledge. 

This is the first time, Ron, I have heard what to me is a good explanation of what distinquishes substantives from properties and other kinds of descriptors (as the most general term for something that can be used as a predicate,from 'tree' to 'tall' to 'brown' to 'lumberjack' to 'loves' to  'Saturday' to 'cut down on'. ) 

That is, I might, and will, for the nonce, use the term 'substantive' to describe what your 'actualist metaphysical' ontology recognizes as 'existing' things that have affordances.   Like Trees, Houses, Tornadoes, real number theory?  And, you seem to recognize also agents, as either something different or a special kind of real thing, but one that seems to have to exist FIRST.  Personally, I am not interested in metaphysical ontology, per se, but the structural role of descriptors,  in the organization, design, and behavior of systems. 

Dividing descriptors into categories like this for this purpose has a long and distinquished history in system design, from Peter Coad's 'colors', through Rebecca Wirfs-Brock  to Trygve Regenskaug's Role Modelling, to Evans "Domain Driven Design." 

So, even when one starts, with an undifferentiated set of descriptors or properties, as in typical predictate calculus, it is very useful in explaining systems, to categorize the descriptors, into the kinds of category names that are often used in this forum, such as 'role'.   They are akin to grammatical categories for the ontology, related to linquistic grammatical categories in the way that Paul Builelaar's work on LEMON describes, as Leo Orbst recently pointed us to. (For example, when linquists discuss whether a language has adjectives, they use the word 'property' to describe the language-independent concept that, in most languages, is sometimes represented by the grammatical category 'adjective'.   These categories are, I think, what one should find in an 'upper' ontology.  (The problem is, that these categories don't make for neat deep subtype hierachies.  But solving that problem is a different subject.)

So, I find your suggestion at the core of the first step for organizing a computational ontology.   Especially, I believe that treating responsiblity as a basic notion, or some broader varient, such as intension, is critical to the most effective way to design human designed systems, like spaceflight missions,  as well as to understand the evolution of the systems in which people participate, such as international financial services, the profession of microbiology, or the family. 

Wm

On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 1:18 PM, Ronald Stamper <stamper.measur@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Dear All, 

May I enquire of fellow Ontologgers what ontologies (metaphysical) they embrace?  Surely they lead to interestingly different ontologies (computational) and different theories of meaning.

 

 Watching the “person, boy, man” game from the touchline I wondered by what ontological (m not c) rules do the participant play? Surely those basic assumptions would illuminate their discussions.

 

 I favour a kind of actualism that recognises as existing only things that a responsible agent can perceive here and now as affordances, which are invariant repertoires of behaviour (following James Gibson’s Theory of Affordances).   This suits my temperament as an engineer.  An agent may be an individual or an institution.  An affordance usually depends for its existence upon the coexistence of some ontological antecedents (these carry role names linked to the relevant affordance).  A community may confer personhood on either and take it away. Social norms also determine the existence of childhood and adulthood and even womanhood (American history interesting on this point).  Variant universal affordances are shared as perceptual norms over various, particular communities, whose social norms also supply the authorities governing the starts and finishes of affordances, both universal and particular.

 Ontologies (m) that presume the existence of 3 or 4 dimensions lead to ontologies (c) quite different from actualist ontological dependency schemas.  Ordinary linear time, for example is a sophisticated construct from the labels of the starts and finishes of affordances; starts and finishes cannot be examined in the here-and-now because they are always in the past or the future, so we only know them as signs /records of them and their relationships.  Topology tells us about spaces that afford one different kinds of routes and access between places, including different dimensions.

 Other ontologies (m) have no place for responsibility as a basic notion, they may employ truth instead but, from this actualist point of view, an abstract notion of truth must be constructed socially until it becomes a believably useful abstraction.  Powerful abstractions that help to simplify our world models are not rejected: but they do need to be explained.

Regards,

Ronald

 

 

 

 

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