Thanks for this, thanks for lots of stuff. (01)
This morning, I'm continuing to look at this "Applied Ontology" anthology --
trying to get some measure of its credibility and real-world practicality --
http://ontology.buffalo.edu/AppliedOntology.pdf --
and am taking another look at this related statement from you --
http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/signproc.pdf -- which begins by citing "Logos" --
a theme I personally find highly attractive. (02)
And floating in the background for me is this new internet application I've
been exploring, that I call a "collaborative backbone" -- which is
essentially a way to develop a "collaborative outline" designed in a
three-level ontology of "theme" (broadest category), "topic" (some subject
within that theme) and "tag" (some brief twitter-like text string that can
play the role of a list item or maybe an alternative for voting). This
creates a web-based outline processor -- that can become "collaborative" in
various ways -- as different groups consider whether they might want to
share particular elements of this hierarchy where they consider
inter-sector/inter-group collaboration to be important. I am somebody who
has taken an interdisciplinary approach most of my life, and because this
seems so essential today, I am exploring ways to develop some kind of
"common tree" where the sectors of inclusion are very diverse and broad. In
the context of "Logos" -- are we bringing logicians and theologians together
-- looking for some kind of common underlying ontology? This might be a
very potent thing to do. So, this "backbone" framework is an exploration
of how that might be possible -- and for some probably wooly-headed reason I
am wondering whether something like this approach could support a
collaborative approach to broadly inclusive ontology.... (03)
*** (04)
JOHN: Tom and Bruce, (05)
I was not trying to attack anyone personally -- especially not anyone on
this list. If I gave that impression, I deeply apologize. (06)
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. (07)
BRUCE: I've been looking at the emergence of "universal religion" for a long
time -- a process largely driven by globalization and "encounter" -- as
ideas from once-insular cultures interact and common ground tends to emerge.
So, this theme of "religious wars" is very familiar -- and obviously
high-profile today... (08)
And this notion of "absolute certainty" -- well -- good point. Maybe
"certainty" and "concept" are slightly contradictory notions -- and what we
really should hope for is some kind of statistical resonance -- where we
honor the inevitable diversity in a world of intersecting private
dictionaries.... (09)
JOHN: 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 (010)
BRUCE: I'll take on that article today -- read it carefully, see if I can
actually understand it -- and comment on it from my own point of view which
does tend to be very top-down -- ("viewing particulars from within an
implicit framework like Logos") (011)
JOHN: (012)
> Today, I've been looking at an introductory book called "Applied
> Ontology"... http://ontology.buffalo.edu/AppliedOntology.pdf (013)
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: (014)
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. (015)
No! That assumes that certainty is attainable. Adopting that idea would be
the death of science and the stagnation of engineering. (016)
BRUCE: I want to contemplate this notion a bit and give these guys a chance
to be more specific about what they mean. When I first picked up this PDF
and started going through it, my first reaction was -- "this stuff is
naively simplistic" -- they are making very complex issues too simple.
After a more careful review, I might still feel that way -- but for right
now, I want to consider their point of view. What are they actually
suggesting? (017)
And I thought it was interesting that this same point, I think you made
yesterday -- where somebody said (now I am oversimplifying) that "all
science is wrong" because it is an evolutionary process where the theory of
today will be supplanted by better theory tomorrow -- is a point also made
in the Applied Ontology book. At a quick glance, yes, it does look to me
like they are saying everything can be neatly fitted into little boxes --
but maybe I am misreading... (018)
JOHN: Following is the opening quotation from the signproc.pdf article: (019)
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. (020)
Section 2 of signproc.pdf, which has the title "A Static, Lifeless,
Purposeless World", goes into more detail about these issues. (021)
BRUCE: I will find the time/energy to read this carefully -- with particular
attention to the issue of "collaboration" -- and how something workable and
practical might emerge today from a conjunction of perspectives, where each
advocate is representing something essential but perhaps not in ways that
are commensurate with some other essential element. (022)
JOHN: 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. (023)
BRUCE: Well, if I understand this -- I like this notion of "under-specify"
-- such that big categories come together in "soft" ways -- maybe with
hundreds of little context-specific bridges around the particulars... (024)
JOHN: 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 (025)
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 (026)
BRUCE: I will take a look. Thanks for all this. (027)
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