Re: [ontolog-forum] Watchout Watson: Here comes Amazon Machine Learning

[Adrian Walker <adriandwalker@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Ed,

The following is a nice illustration of your last point, right?

          "Ceci n'est pas une pipe."

          --  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images

Cheers,  -- Adrian

On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 1:57 PM, Edward Barkmeyer <ebarkmeyer@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

John,

I agree with this:
> Possibility and necessity affect the logic, not the ontology

I disagree with this in more than one way:
> They can be treated in the same way as plans for the future.
> For example, if you're designing an airplane or a bridge, it's a possibility until it's actually built.

The handling of future things is very much about what the ontological commitments are.  One "can" treat future things as 'possibilities', by making that ontological commitment, but one can also treat them as 'facts' by making a different commitment.  In a 4D logic, for example, it is entirely acceptable to provide the time stamp for temporal parts of a thing as future dates and times.  And it is a common practice in creating business calendars.  It is also possible to treat them as "mental events" a la Davidson.  Future is yet another ontological can of worms.

My engineering (and semiotics) background objects to your example.  The design for an aircraft is a design, not an aircraft.  The design exists independently of its realization.  The design itself may undergo state changes, which are modeled in various ways, including "versions", which are much more common than "temporal parts".

And one can make the same argument about "plans" for future events.  The "plan" is the "mental event" that conceptualizes the expected event.  It can exist long before the actual event, which may never come to pass.

In short, this is all about your ontology, and only some ontological choices affect the choice of logic.

-Ed

P.S.  Confusing a design for a thing with the thing itself is a semiotic error -- it is ontologically simply wrong.  The problem in many engineering disciplines is that the design engineers *only* work with designs and prototypes, and they use the *terms* for the actual things in describing their design objects.  But that is a term/denotation practice; and the denotation of the same terms in the manufacturing and operations environment is different.

-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F Sowa
Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2015 8:13 AM
To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Watchout Watson: Here comes Amazon Machine Learning - ZDNet- 2015.04.10

Dear Matthew,

Possibility and necessity affect the logic, not the ontology:

> Another problematic category is possibilia (things that might be, or
> possibly are in some parallel universe).

They can be treated in the same way as plans for the future.
For example, if you're designing an airplane or a bridge, it's a possibility until it's actually built.

> The criteria for including possibilia (or not) is utility vs the
> baggage that comes with the extra commitment.

The categories of parts, part numbers, etc., might be empty in actuality, but they are specified in the ontology by the same methods before and after the things are built.

There are, of course, issues about storing information about the future in the database -- orders for future delivery of things that don't yet exist, reservations for hotels, travel, etc.
The orders and reservations exist in the present (or past), but they refer to things and events in the future.

Tom Johnston wrote a book about time and temporal issues in databases.  Perhaps he might care to comment on this point.

Following is an article in which I discuss issues about modality, possible worlds, and the laws that govern them:

    http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/worlds.pdf
    Worlds, models, and descriptions

And by the way, possibilities are another area where a strictly nominalist position (e.g., Quine's or Goodman's) gets into trouble.

Clarence Irving Lewis, who defined the first modern versions of modal logic, had been the chair of the philosophy department at Harvard while Quine was a student and later a professor.

But Quine was very strongly opposed to any version of modal logic and any talk of possibilia.  Hao Wang, who had earned a PhD under Quine's supervision, was very critical of Quine's attitude.  He called it *logical negativism*.  See

    Wang, Hao (1986) Beyond Analytic Philosophy: Doing Justice
    to What We Know, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

John

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