Tom and Bruce, (01)
I was not trying to attack anyone personally -- especially not anyone
on this list. If I gave that impression, I deeply apologize. (02)
My primary target is a tendency that was started by the theologians
who were literally fighting "religious wars". Descartes exacerbated
that tendency by promoting absolute certainty as a goal of philosophy. (03)
Frege was seduced by that pernicious tendency when he set out “to
break the domination of the word over the human spirit by laying bare
the misconceptions that through the use of language often almost
unavoidably arise concerning the relations between concepts.”
I discussed the unfortunate results in the following article:
http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/signproc.pdf (04)
Tom
> This present reply, sad to say, is a somewhat defensive remark
> on my part, defending myself against an attribution of ignorance (05)
I realize that you have a solid understanding of philosophy. I was not
assuming that you didn't know the issues. But I tried to emphasize
that modern analytic philosophy, which pays more attention to Frege
than to Peirce, is still suffering from the Cartesian disease. (06)
Bruce
> Today, I've been looking at an introductory book called "Applied
> Ontology"... http://ontology.buffalo.edu/AppliedOntology.pdf (07)
That book has a lot of good material in it, but some of it suffers
from the Cartesian quest for certainty. From the passage you quoted: (08)
Blurb on back cover of AppliedOntology.pdf
> automated information systems must be able to share information.
> If this is to be possible, every system has to represent this
> information in the same way. (09)
No! That assumes that certainty is attainable. Adopting that idea
would be the death of science and the stagnation of engineering.
Following is the opening quotation from the signproc.pdf article: (010)
Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas
> Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of
> limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system
> is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance. (011)
Section 2 of signproc.pdf, which has the title "A Static, Lifeless,
Purposeless World", goes into more detail about these issues. (012)
Furthermore, there are trillions of dollars of legacy systems that
are not going to be replaced any time soon. When they are upgraded
or replaced, the new systems are *always* upward compatible with the
old ones. Nobody is going to adopt an incompatible ontology no matter
who recommended it. If anything, they'll use a very underspecified
terminology, such as Schema.org. (013)
Tim Berners-Lee recognized the need to support heterogeneity and
diversity. That is a major theme of his DAML proposal in 2000:
http://www.w3.org/2000/01/sw/DevelopmentProposal (014)
Jim Hendler, who wrote the original BAA for DAML, also emphasized
heterogeneity and diversity. But those words did not appear in
the DAML final report. For more about these issues, see the
collection of documents on the theme of Semantic Interoperability:
http://www.jfsowa.com/ikl (015)
John (016)
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