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Re: [ontolog-forum] Is Philosophy Useful in Software Engineering Ontolog

To: "'[ontolog-forum] '" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "Rich Cooper" <metasemantics@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2015 10:23:36 -0700
Message-id: <036b01d0ad10$2d8e3200$88aa9600$@com>

Here is a very insightful passage from the same author, same source:

 

To conclude, whereas all other animals live in an objective world of rivers, trees and lions, we humans live in dual world. Yes, there are rivers, trees and lions in our world. But on top of that objective reality, we have constructed a second layer of make-believe reality, comprising fictional entities such as the European Union, God, the dollar and human rights.

 

Before that concluding paragraph, he gives many vivid examples in which he expresses a belief in how specific groups of people believe in the same "story", but the said "story"s have no counterpart in physical reality. 

 

The point he makes is that groups (like philosophers, engineers, financiers, hookers, ...) have  a culture that marks the group as different from other groups in some uniform way. 

 

For philosophers, there seems to be a jargon that is very well defined in some vague terms, along with a lot of precision on how those vague terms fit together into concepts.  I'm sure those terms are not vague to philosophers, and that the concepts are very important to philosophers.  That is a natural outcome of someone who iteratively invests effort to learn, refine, and apply a discipline - any discipline - over a long enough period.  What you do is what you learn to like. 

 

For engineers, the jargon has to do with the well understood (by engineers) problems and concepts in the engineering subdisciplines.  So software engineers build ontologies around efficiently, effectively executable functionalities, or data representations, or most often, an intimately intermixed concoction of said functions and data, with the top level "object" and "event" boundaries designed for the sake of minimizing the duplication of functionalities or data. 

 

We don't alter our designs to fit some authoritative but vague principalia, because that doesn't get the programs working, communicating, and executing said functions on said data in an acceptable order.  Engineering is too much a balancing of what is needed as provided by what is available, cost effective, and quick to reach the first proof of principle.

 

There are many choices to be made in engineering software.  If I can buy a package that has a good interface, provides complete coverage of a function or representation requirement, then I write a program around that package's API.  If I find an objection to the package that makes it hard to work with, hard to integrate, or hard to understand, for my specific applications required ontology of objects and events, I go find another one.  If there are none, I consider the cost and schedule to design one. 

 

On the other hand, philosophers don't have a testbed where they can model and simulate their ideas, play with the inputs and results, and test out their conceptualizations.  It's just pure opinion for which the majority of influential philosophers think things, and the conforming disciples memorize them.  At least that is how it seems to me, a nonphilosopher.

 

And philosophy is an arm chair discipline.  Philosophers can memorize, perhaps even understand their ancestral influencers.  From those common sources, philosophers learn about many examples of rational thought, but there is no requirement within philosophy, to my knowledge at least,  of dealing within the political, economic, and diversely constrained projects that produce consumer or enterprise quality software. 

 

No disrespect intended to philosophers, engineers, or anybody else.  I'm just sayin'.  Please feel free to respond, hopefully to address the subject line, whether you agree or disagree. 

 

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

 

From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Rich Cooper
Sent: Monday, June 22, 2015 9:02 AM
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Is Philosophy Useful in Software Engineering Ontologies?

 

"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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