ontolog-forum
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: [ontolog-forum] The "qua-entities" paradigm

To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 01 Jun 2015 01:12:05 -0400
Message-id: <556BE9A5.60509@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Leo and Gian Piero,    (01)

Leo
> Krifka, Manfred. 1990. "Four Thousand Ships Passed Through The Lock:
> Object-Induced Measure Functions on Events". Linguistics and Philosophy
> 13 (1990), 487-520.    (02)

Gian Piero
> Thanks for telling me about [Krifka's paper] - even if, in my humble
> opinion, a complex formal analysis is not really necessary to deal
> with this topic.    (03)

I agree that the paper is (a) interesting, but (b) far more complex
than it should be.  It has 34 pages of formalism -- see below for
excerpts that show why it's so complex.    (04)

I agree with Matthew that a 4D system can simplify many descriptions.
That is the basis for Whitehead's process ontology:    (05)

  1. Mereology + 4D space-time    (06)

  2. Processes are fundamental, with events as spatial and temporal
     parts of processes.    (07)

  3. Objects are slowly changing processes that are sufficiently
     stable that repeated events can be recognized as parts of
     the same process.    (08)

With this ontology, multiple "passenger" events can be recognized
as temporal parts of the same "person" process.    (09)

Whitehead's ontology is far more compatible with modern science
than any ontology that takes macroscopic objects as primitive.    (010)

Rescher wrote a very good critique of the object-based ontologies
by Quine, Strawson, and others.  For a summary with references,
see pp. 5 and 6 of http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/signproc.pdf    (011)

John
_______________________________________________________________________    (012)

http://semantics.uchicago.edu/kennedy/classes/s07/events/krifka90.pdf    (013)

[The solution] is couched in a more general framework for the semantics
of mass nouns, count nouns, measure constructions, and temporal
constitution (i.e., aspectual classes), which was developed in Krifka
(1986, to appear). This framework takes on the one hand the treatment
of mass nouns and plural nouns in an algebraic (lattice-theoretic)
semantics, as developed by Link (1983), and the event semantics
developed by Davidson (1967) and Parsons (1980) on the other (cf.
Hinrichs, 1985; Bach, 1986; Link, 1987; and Lasersohn, 1988 for related
approaches). Furthermore, it combines them with notions developed in
the theory of measurement...    (014)

In Section (3), I will present two versions of this analysis, the
second of which is semantically somewhat more complicated, but more
in agreement with the syntactic structure...    (015)

In Section (4), I will go into some cases which seem to pose special
problems for at least one of the two analyses - namely, coordination, 
quantifiers, comparison, anaphora, and phase nouns. Finally, I will
argue that the event-related readings of our examples are a special
case of a more common phenomenon, which in general can be described
as the extension of measure functions from one domain to another...    (016)

_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/  
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/  
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/ 
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J    (017)

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>