Dear Pat,
I apologize for the several days of delay that kept
me busy till now, but here is my reply to your thoughtful post.
You wrote below:<<
PH>> Something
seems to be wrong here: if this were a real difference about the structure of
the actual world and this centrally important, then it would be an issue in
physics; and it isn't. I have suspected for a long time that it had to be
basically an artifact of a limitation of our usual formalisms, and I think I
can now show that.
Pat<<
With the primitive state of physics today, we have zillions more
hypotheses (in your words, but when mathematically proven or not, theories
in my words, until they have been conclusively validated in reality) than we
can reasonably explore in any complete way.
What is missing in today's knowledge is just how, and why,
people work in the situations we each find ourselves occupying. With a
precise description of that, we can simulate it, but that simulation doesn't
make it real. Viz the Ice Age Warnings => Global Warming => Climate
Change => "voted out of office" sequence of democrat politicalalia.
As so many political transitions have shown, as JFS said, "people
will do what they damn well please".
PH>> Each side
believes itself to be right with the force of a religious commitment. Entire
ontological engineering efforts have taken one or another position on this matter
and welded their positions into formalisms and software, making cooperation
very difficult. Something seems to be wrong here: if this were a real
difference about the structure of the actual world and this centrally
important, then it would be an issue in physics; and it isn't. I have suspected
for a long time that it had to be basically an artifact of a limitation of our
usual formalisms, and I think I can now show that.
<<
I agree that " Each side believes itself to be right
with the force of a religious commitment." I also agree that "Entire
ontological engineering efforts have taken one or another position on this
matter and welded their positions into formalisms and software, making
cooperation very difficult". I also agree that "Something seems to
be wrong here:...".
But that suggests to me a control feedback with setpoint for
some evolutionary survival property, or behavior, or taxis. We stick
together in various kinds of groups. The kinship relationship (one such
grouping) has been described already, but there are other pair wise motivators
that bind people to groups and the reverse.
The groups may start with high levels of diversity, such as the
Romans who overthrew the Etruscan enslavers and started a highly diverse group
of men with stolen "wives" - the Rape of the Sabine Women" as it
was called. Over time, groups that survive eventually reach an only
modestly divergent population, but the main subscription requirement is
allegiance to the group.
Greenies seek other greenies, democrats seek other democrats,
SPCA volunteers seek others. And those in a group find their spectrum of belief
issues gradually changing to match those in the group due to the emotional
structure of our minds, IMHO, shared with so many "lower" animals, from
bonobos, through crows, to dolphins, ants, octopi, you name it.
There is an inherited capability in our makeup for behavioral
taxes that leads us toward groups of others with similar enough
characteristics, or common property values, that we want to be part of.
But not everyone wants to be in a group. There are always exceptions,
even to the exceptions.
You continued:
PH>> Entire
ontological engineering efforts have taken one or another position on this
matter and welded their positions into formalisms and software, making
cooperation very difficult.<<
I think the reason for that consistently appearing result, is
likely to be that people literally have different models in their minds,
because they have unique specific experience bases in their memories. The
reason is literally the subjectivity of the individual. You've heard
(seen) me say (type) this before in many examples. I think you should
seriously consider that as a possible cause and debate it with me at your
convenience.
It's not only the jargon of a specific vertical application
(which is also included of course). It's also due to the context which
each person associates with the objects and actions, the instances and events,
about which the subjective participants bring to the interpretation of said
instances and events.
It is my opinion that each individual should have one or more
personal ontologies that, together, scratch the itches he needs scratched to be
productive and efficient. Alternatively, you can run it like a group of
draftees told to do the same things in the same words, but again as JFS
mentioned earlier, "people will do whatever they damn well
please". So the idea of a common vocabulary for those
"concepts" philosophers agree on would make a good basic ontology,
with a vocabulary that philosophers alone can like. But even philosophers
can't agree on it.
Groups of people united by a common passion (e.g., FOL,
Religion, Science, Politics, Lunch, ...) can use a substitute vocabulary
derived by analyzing the corpus of said group's members' communications.
Same with subgroups, so the IEEE, or AAAI, or ACM, or National Geographic, can
have top level vocabularies that substitute properly for *MANY* of the
philosophical ones, if there are philosophers enough volunteering to write the
substitution dictionaries. I doubt if SMEs will want to write the reverse
- translations from subject matter vocabularies to philosophical ones will be
of much interest to them.
Ditto with the other groups. Ultimately, individuals will
choose their own favorite mappings to your FOL terminology. But people
only will use it if *THEY* decide it is *USEFUL* to them.
So the main task of selling ontologies is more in the marketing
domain than in the philosophical , ontological, engineering or linguistic
expressions of knowledge. You have to satisfy the user's felt
needs. All the users, all their felt needs.
Again you continued:
"I have suspected
for a long time that it had to be basically an artifact of a limitation of our
usual formalisms, and I think I can now show that.".
Pat, if you can show that, or even show it as likely, I would
love to look at it. Please send me or the list whatever you think will
demonstrate that, because I am very, very interested in that debate.
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper,
Rich Cooper,
www DOT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
( 9 4 9 ) 5 2 5-5 7 1 2
From:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Patrick J.
Hayes
Sent: Tuesday, March 17, 2015 2:07 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Endurantism and Perdurantism - Re: Some
Comments on Descriptive vs. Prescriptive Ontologies
Rich, I agree that almost any two people will eventually
differ on some conceptual point or other, sometimes quite soon. I have a
collection of amusing anecdotes from working on CYC where this kind of thing
happened. But the philosophical debates about endurantism versus perdurantism
seem to be at a higher (?deeper?) level than this kind of variation, and have
proven to be a stubborn problem in many domains. Every position on this
higher-level debate comes with a huge freight of philosophical authority and
argument, which makes it almost impossible to resolve. Each side believes itself
to be right with the force of a religious commitment. Entire ontological
engineering efforts have taken one or another position on this matter and
welded their positions into formalisms and software, making cooperation very
difficult. Something seems to be wrong here: if this were a real difference
about the structure of the actual world and this centrally important, then it
would be an issue in physics; and it isn't. I have suspected for a long time
that it had to be basically an artifact of a limitation of our usual
formalisms, and I think I can now show that.
Rich Cooper
<Rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> , 3/17/2015 2:15 PM:
Dear Amanda,
You wrote:
Yes, but more than that. In addition, the actual logic allows each point of
view to be expressed in ways that 'natural' for it, and appropriate conclusions
drawn within that point of view, and yet both POVs can use the same vocabulary
and be not only mutually consistent (in the strict logical sense) but even
interderivable from one another, given appropriate linking axioms. So a
conclusion stated in one style can be interderivable with the same conclusion
stated in the other style.
While that is true, it should also be that SMEs 1 and 2 would
describe a slightly different view, using slightly different vocabulary, not
only in the orthogonal sense of logic for different views, but in the sense of
the reasoning each uses to customize the individual history with that semantic
belief of 1, versus that semantic belief of 2.
In every KE project I have worked on, conducted or been involved
with, there are subtle differences in world view of each participant. If
they got to freely discuss and debate wherever problems arose, it could get
intense, but it worked more smoothly than the sweat shop management
method. If the manager or customer determined a highly detailed work plan
without discussing it with KEs in the same detail, the plan would be very
unstable, with lots of unanticipated problems that vary by the week.
So requiring a single POV's vocabulary to match another's simply
hasn't worked historically. Therefore, I expect each claim in a patent to
have a unique vocabulary beyond the claim construction vocabulary. So
far, they do, and by experience I know that the crucial issues will be decided
over those words and phrases that are not standard. Each claim represents
one POV as specified, edited, reviewed, and ultimately issued.
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper,
Rich Cooper,
www DOT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
( 9 4 9 ) 5 2 5-5 7 1 2
From:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Amanda
Vizedom
Sent: Tuesday, March 17, 2015 11:19 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Endurantism and Perdurantism - Re: Some
Comments on Descriptive vs. Prescriptive Ontologies
Comment below.
On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 1:46 PM, Pat Hayes <phayes@xxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Mar 17, 2015, at 2:24 AM, Matthew West <dr.matthew.west@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> Dear Pat,
> It seems to me you are saying that the data elements that you need to talk
> about what is true at a time and change over time are the same for the
> different views of how the world is.
Yes, but more than that. In addition, the actual logic allows each point of
view to be expressed in ways that 'natural' for it, and appropriate conclusions
drawn within that point of view, and yet both POVs can use the same vocabulary
and be not only mutually consistent (in the strict logical sense) but even
interderivable from one another, given appropriate linking axioms. So a conclusion
stated in one style can be interderivable with the same conclusion stated in
the other style.
> I agree. If you are to provide an
> adequate description of however the world is from different view points, I
> think that must be so even. If not the different views would not work, and
> would be dismissed. The problem is that the different views are workable,
> rather than demonstrably wrong.
> However, I don't think that a data format that obfuscates the different
> views helps. It does not make the different views the same somehow, it
just
> demonstrates some level of equivalence. Equivalence is not the same as
> compatibility.
Indeed, but one gets actual compatibility from this style of axiomatization.
(Well to be very careful, there are things that can only be stated in one
framework, but nothing can be done about that.)
Pat
Yes, and more than that: The approach Pat
describes does not "obfuscate the different views." Having
sufficient expressiveness and logical features allows one to represent very
many things as seen from both + perspectives. If you are working on a project
for which it is useful to have that flexibility, it is very, very likely that
it will also be useful to *capture*, that is *model* the different views more
or less explicitly. You will also want not only model-parts that let you
convert between the two, but inference support that actually does this, and
easily.
Having these things is very useful in enabling
multi-modal, multi-directional, and flexible interaction between an ontological
knowledge base and (a) people, (b) varied systems, and (c) complementary
sub-systems such as NLP that have their own internal representation and can be
used more efficiently if they can interact with the knowledge base's contents
in a particular form. In other words, such flexibility, with explicit
(non-obfuscated) axiomitization of various models and relationships between
them, enables a wider variety of applications, guis, and systems to work with
the same ontology / knowledge base, each interacting with the knowledge
(semi-)normalized to the form most conducive to that interaction.
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