Interesting exchange - thanks.
How does blueness when stated as an attribute of a thing, get
reflected in the thing becoming a member of a set of 'all blue
things'? The set of all blue things unimaginatively would be defined
as those things that have a blue attribute. But one can name this
set/extent and call it 'blue', and one may subsequently say that a
thing is-a 'blue'.
It's clear that hasAttr is a useful building block for a standard
model for reasoning tools -- I'm not certain it's a great idea to
inflict this requirement on ontologies in the main. In other words,
let's distinguish between the ontology internal to reasoning tools,
and the ontologies of the data that feed the tools.
On 2/25/2014 10:37 AM, Barkmeyer,
Edward J wrote:
I
intended to add this to my previous email.
William
wrote:
> Nothing
wrong with the word 'attribute', or the way CHEN and now
> everyone uses it.
>
> EXCEPT FOR Tthe BIG MISTAKE of thinking that a certain
kind of thingie
> (say blue) IS an attribute, just because it **can play
that role.**
Right!
This is even worse than the problem of making the role a
subtype of its ‘range’: the things that can play the role.
This makes the range type a subtype of ‘role’, which is
properly not a ‘type’ at all.
I
think the origin of this error is the specific distinction
in Chen’s model between ‘attributes’, as relationships to
‘values’ (computational representations), and
‘relationships’ as relationships to ‘entities’. If you view
the ‘value’ as JUST the computational entity – an integer, a
real number, a character string -- then the ‘role’ actually
gives it useful semantics. It is not that ‘blue’ IS an
attribute of things, but rather that the string “blue” AS an
attribute refers to a color of things.
In
Sjir Nijssen’s approach, by comparison, Color is a
‘non-lexical object type’ and Blue is an instance of that
type, but, when converting that model to a database schema,
we may decide that the “NOLOT” Color can be represented by a
‘lexical object type (LOT)’ that is said to be a subtype of
String. This sorts out the distinction between the semantic
Blue and the string “blue”. In a similar way, the ISO 11179
metadata model distinguishes between the ‘conceptual value’
Blue and the ‘data element value’ “blue”.
But
we can think of this as a progression of understanding –
Chen (1976), Nijssen (1982), ISO 11179 (1998).
-Ed
On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 11:10 PM,
John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Ed, Pat C, William,
.....
WF
>
Nothing wrong with the word 'attribute', or the way
CHEN and now
> everyone uses it.
>
> EXCEPT FOR Tthe BIG MISTAKE of thinking that a
certain kind of thingie
> (say blue) IS an attribute, just because it
**can play that role.**
I agree. I would use a dyadic
relation named HasAttr to relate
an entity to something called an attribute of that
entity.
An attribute of something is only an attribute when it
is viewed
in the role of the second argument of a relation named
'HasAttr'.
Right, I have been saying the
following on this forum for almost two years:
being an attribute is, in human language, not a
fixed feature of a word or a concept, except for
some of the words in some minority of languages.
In others, 'beauty' and 'beautiful' and 'is
beautiful' are expressed with exactly the same
word, and the role in the sentence is market
either by word position (in a positional language)
or a particle that shows this (in a tagged
language).
In a very mongrel language like English, things
are very complex, because multiple patterns are in
play at the same time, on a word-by-word basis.
For example, some words, like 'German', and the
same as nouns and adjectives. He is German, He is
A German, while others that occupy the same
semantic space, like English and Scottish, are not
the same, but have to turn into English Person and
Scot.
psycholinquists
are examining how various language-related
disabilities are manifested by speakers of
different languages, and thus finding more about
what is the same and different about the
fundamental samenesses and differences between
thinking and speaking in different languages.
They don't use entities, attributes, and
relationships as their foundation, nor parts of
speech like nouns and verbs. They tend to use
theta roles.
Given
this, why would one want to insist that the
fundamental organization of thought or a universal
simple way to express propositions is based on
entities, their attributes, and their relationships?
>
In another attibutive relation, the same thingie,
blue, can play
> the role of attributed to, such as in 'blue
is a color.'
This raises the question about
instances of blueness. We'd like to say
the blue of your coat is darker than the blue of the
sky. So we need
to include instances of blueness in the ontology:
the HasAttr relation
relates a coat x to an instance of blueness y, which
we can relate to
another instance of blueness z of the sky.
Yes, this is yet another role
that 'blue' can plan. It can be the name for a
particular repeatable experience of blueness.
The blue of my coat is, if I understand correctly,
what some metaphysicians are calling 'tropes'
these days.
" According to
trope theory, the world consists (wholly or
partly) of ontologically unstructured (simple)
abstract particulars or, as they are normally
called,
tropes. " Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy
That is, it is a particular but
repeatable experience of blue. And, in fact, if
I understand, in this thought, 'my coat' is there
just to locate the blue experience using a shared
identifier, becasue the experience of that
blueness, along with many other cues, is in fact
one of the things that underlies constructing the
coat in question out of our fundamental
experiences. Personally, I like this direction
for metaphysics, in that it brings it closer to
psychophysics and social psychology.
WF
>
Did you ever have clients who had trouble seeing
that 'customer'
> was a role, and that so was 'vendor,' so that
the vendor and customer
> might be the same company?
Good old Aristotle was quite
clear about those issues. He
distinguished the "substance" -- such as HumanBeing
-- from the
"accidents" such as being blue or being a customer,
vendor, etc.
For an Aristotelian description of George
Washington, see slide 6
of http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/aristo.pdf
Yes, and this goes back to some
previous discussions here about natural types,
with which I also agree.
But I have found it harder to sell that idea right
off the bat than selling the understanding that
some words used to describe things are actually
describing roles of the things (customer,
scoutmaster) , and others are not (person).
John
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