"You can
never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising that after he
dies, he will go to Chimpanzee Heaven and there receive countless bananas for
his good deeds. No chimp will ever believe such a story. Only humans believe
such stories. This is why we rule the world, whereas chimps are locked up in
zoos and research laboratories."
- Yuval Noah Harari
http://ideas.ted.com/why-humans-run-the-world/
I translate that to mean "philosophy is for
conformists".
Sincerely,
Rich
Cooper,
Rich Cooper,
Chief Technology Officer,
MetaSemantics Corporation
MetaSemantics AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
( 9 4 9 ) 5 2 5-5 7 1 2
http://www.EnglishLogicKernel.com
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F Sowa
Sent: Monday, June 22, 2015 6:38 AM
To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Is Philosophy Useful in Software Engineering
Ontologies?
Leo, Bruce, and Tom,
I was tied up with some pressing deadlines. But I'd
like to make a few comments on some of the basic issues in this thread.
Leo
> Of course it helps if ontology
engineers/implementers acquire a deep
> understanding of philosophy, and if philosophers
acquire a deep
> understanding/practice of ontology
engineers/implementers...
>
> Understanding involves learning about both sides.
Yes, but a Phil 101 course for the engineers and a
Software Engineering 101 course for the philosophers is far from sufficient.
Getting anything more for any but a tiny fraction of the
people who need it is not going to happen.
Therefore, we have to face reality and work on Plan B.
Leo
> Once we have very solid NL technologies that can do
semantic
> interpretation and mappings to ontologies in
specific domains and
> contexts, then...
For unrestricted NLs, that will *never* happen. I
completely agree with Alan Perlis: "You can't map informal language
to formal language by any formal algorithm."
But with sufficient background knowledge and the ability
to carry on a dialog to ask "Socratic" questions, it would be
possible for a computer system to do quite a lot -- without going very far
beyond the AI & NLP research available today.
Bruce
> so that universally-meaningful concepts like
“identity” or “comparison”
> or “similarity” or
“difference” or “analogy” can be given exact and
> very simple definitions with some hope of becoming
consensual...
That's not possible. The reason why they're
"universally meaningful"
is that they're vague, context-dependent, and
sufficiently flexible that they can be adapted to any subject of any kind.
Fundamental principle:
* If you're developing a normative ontology for a
specific project
or family of closely related projects,
you can state precise
definitions for all applications in
that field.
* But if you're trying to understand natural
language on any
topic, you can't be
"Ontoclean" -- because NLs must be adaptable
to anything. Any ontology useful
for NLP must be "Ontodirty".
Tom
> I recommend an excellent article,
"Categories", from the Stanford
> Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/categories/
I agree that the article is good of its kind. But
it's written by a philosopher for other philosophers, and it would not give
Rich or any other software developer any useful guidelines.
In the following points, I'm not criticizing the author
of that article -- I'm criticizing the entire academic tradition:
1. The author starts with Aristotle, but does not
mention that
A's book on categories was part
of the Organon (Instrument)
for doing science. A's
father was a physician, from whom he
learned the importance of
careful observation and recording
of details.
2. Aristotle wrote more about biology than he did
about metaphysics,
and he did very careful
experiments. From the very beginning, he
developed his categories as an
*applied* science. Galen was very
impressed by Aristotle, and he
couched his vast writings on
medicine in an Aristotelian
framework.
3. Section 1.6 has two paragraphs on
"Categories in other disciplines"
and just 3 references. The
first paragraph mentions "information
systems" and cites another
philosopher. The second cites two
cognitive scientists, but says
nothing about linguistics and
lexicography.
4. Those are subjects that stimulated the work on
categories by
Leibniz and others in the 17th
century, which had a strong
influence on Kant in the 18th
c. That work in the 17th & 18th
centuries had a strong influence
on Roget in the 19th. But
philosophers have totally
ignored lexicography (except for
Peirce, who was an associate
editor of the _New Century
Dictionary_ -- that's one reason
why his work is still at the
cutting edge of research in AI
& NLP).
5. In Section 1.4 on "Contemporary category
systems", the author
mentions a few that happened to
be developed in the late 20th c.
Ingvar Johansson's system is the
only one that would be useful
as a basis for applied
ontology. Ingvar, by the way, did
participate in the discussions
in Ontolog Forum for a few months.
There were some good
discussions, but like Pat Hayes and others,
he dropped out (and I don't
blame him). One point that's very
important about IJ's system is
that he explicitly recognizes
intentionality as a fundamental
category.
6. But the worst feature of that article (and of a
huge amount
of the philosophical literature)
is a total disregard of
two fundamental issues:
(1) modern science, and (2) the
sign systems by which all living
things communicate.
I admit that many philosophers
do address those issues,
but more often than not, they
just try to develop an
ontology of "common
sense" -- which is usually a fossilized
version of some obsolete version
of science.
7. Science and communication were fundamental for
Aristotle.
In addition to biology (which
was his primary science),
he addressed and named a large
number of the "-ologies"
people have been studying for
over two millennia.
And the first paragraph of A's
book _On Interpretation_
introduces the meaning triangle
(often called Ogden and
Richard's meaning
triangle). For more about that, see
my article, "The role of
logic and ontology in language
and reasoning", http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/rolelog.pdf
As I said above, I blame the entire academic tradition
for these faults -- and it permeates *every* field, not just philosophy.
I have known several very good academics who did
excellent work in relating their research to an interdisciplinary collaboration
with other fields. But they made the mistake of doing that
*before* they got tenure.
When explaining why they were fired, the head of the
department would say things like "you didn't seem to be committed to the
field"
or "your work was outside the mainstream" or
"maybe you'd be happier doing something else" or, worst of all,
"he inspires freshmen".
And by the way, enrollments in philosophy courses and
departments has declined drastically during the past century. You can see
the effects in bookstores. Just count the number of shelves devoted to
"philosophy" in comparison to "new age" and other such
topics.
Those other topics "inspire freshmen".
Any subject that doesn't inspire freshmen won't get any sophomores to enroll in
courses.
John
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