Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontology vs KR

[Steven Ericsson-Zenith <steven@xxxxxxx>]

My first observation must simply be that while epistemology may indeed include a concern for the correspondence theory of "truth," ontology, in its classic sense, is entirely unconcerned with epistemology. Note that there is a necessary distinction between ontology and speaking about the world with some epistemology in mind. 

As far as I can tell, Brian Smith is using the term in the local sense. In other words the corrupt KR engineering form of "ontology" is a reference to some schema design .   

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 4:00 PM, Ali H <asaegyn@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Dear Steven,

It seems to me that any ontology is always grounded in some epistemology. Most of the discourse in this forum seems grounded in some epistemology that is taken to be true for some purpose (I can already envisage Hans Polzer's email to this effect).

In the context of accounting for the epistemology validity of an ontological claim (alternatively, an epistemological interpretation of an ontological claim), I must admit I'm surprised that probabilistic logic does not make much of an appearance in most ontology texts either.

That said, I'm curious to what degree ontologists identify with Brian C. Smith's knowledge representation hypothesis, and to what extent ontology is defined as grounding the selection (a) vs driving the application of (a) in (b).

Best,

Ali

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 6:53 PM, Steven Ericsson-Zenith <steven@xxxxxxx> wrote:

I often note the confusion here. In fact, much that you discuss here is epistemology and not "ontology" at all. In other words, it concerns the theory of knowledge involved. Whereas, ontology concerns the nature of existence at a profound level. I suspect the confusion comes from attempting to reason about how to speak of the world, but this will present a problem to any true ontologist since, in a profound sense, for example, much that is discussed in local "ontologies" does not "exist" in any sense. "Names and naming," for example.

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 3:39 PM, Ali H <asaegyn@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello all,

I know this is a topic that has been tread over many years and many times, but I recently came across this statement from Brian C. Smith in [1]:

Any mechanically embodied intelligent process will be comprised of structural ingredients that a) we as external observers naturally take to represent a propositional account of the knowledge that the overall process exhibits, and b) independent of such external semantic attribution, play a formal but causal and essential role in engendering the behavior that manifests that knowledge.

Why is this definition never proffered when discussing "what is an ontology"?

It seems to me that those in the field of ontology focus on (a). 

Do most (formal) ontologists consider Ontology to be (a), and not (b)? If so, why not?

Lastly, I understand that in pantheon of AI sciences, Ontology is often suggested as a sub-discipline of KR - yet why is there such little cross over from KR to Ontology - or am I simply misinformed (c.f. FOIS vs KR or CommonSenseReasoning as part of AAAI etc) ?

[1] Smith, Brian C. (1985). "Prologue to Reflections and Semantics in a Procedural Language". In Ronald Brachman and Hector J. Levesque. Readings in Knowledge Representation. Morgan Kaufmann. pp. 31–40. 

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