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[ontolog-forum] A question of scope

To: "'[ontolog-forum] '" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "Hans Polzer" <hpolzer@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2015 17:49:27 -0400
Message-id: <019301d106ca$334b0510$99e10f30$@verizon.net>

Rich,

 

I changed to subject line to start a new thread so those more interested in the original question posed by Tom, I believe, can skip over this one. Also, the answers to the questions you ask could fill a book, so I will point you to the SCOPE model document itself, but also give a necessarily brief response to the questions that will give you some idea of what I am talking about, but probably cause you to ask more specific questions.

 

First, the SCOPE model document (not a quick read!): http://www.ncoic.org/images/technology/SCOPE_MODEL_VER1.0.pdf

 

Second, a bit of background. The first version of SCOPE came out of work I was involved with in trying to get a multiplicity of real-world systems developed by a variety of organizations to work together for meaningful operational purposes. While there were any number of technical design/architecture issues involved and that had to be overcome or bypassed in some way, by far the more significant issues that were encountered where the scope boundaries drawn (or, more often, assumed) by the individual system sponsors and developers. The SCOPE model collected these issues into categories and abstracted/generalized them into what we called scope dimensions. The early SCOPE model was contributed to NCOIC which subsequently made the model more general and extended it in several important areas. SCOPE is a conceptual model written in English prose (with due apologies to some of the contributors and readers who complain about the lack of a good tech editor). It is not a computer representation language, if I interpret what you mean by that correctly. Some of the SCOPE dimensions could probably be encoded in such a language, but others might be difficult to represent in such a fashion.

 

Regarding your mention of the paper on “Multiplicity of Perspectives……”, this was done with Dr. Dan DeLaurentis and one of his graduate students, Don Fry for a IEEE conference on Systems of Systems Engineering. It does touch on the SCOPE model and another model for characterizing scope that Dr. DeLaurentis had developed. However, it’s really more about the motivation for scope models and what causes many (most?) interoperability problems to arise in the first place. It posits that a major source of such problems are events (or more gradual changes in the ecosystem) which disrupt or counter the scope assumptions (explicit or implicit) prevalent at the time the systems were being conceived and developed. Put differently, these systems didn’t have each other on their respective radars when the requirements for each were drawn up. And now something has happened that makes it more operationally effective to have the systems work with each other (than continuing to pretend that the other systems don’t exist). The paper gives some examples of real-world events that have caused such context and scope shifts and the kinds of impacts or problems these generated in the systems involved. I can send you a copy of the full paper if you want – I’m not sure why it’s not available on the web unless the IEEE is sitting on it.

 

Regarding your comments about software generation, yes, SCOPE could help with that, but indirectly. I, too, was involved with software reuse projects at DARPA using generation techniques and domain-specific software languages and a domain analysis method to allow rapid configuration of software components for a specific system instance. A key issue here is the dynamic range of operational scope space that a given set of software components is designed to address, and the way that this is represented in the software interfaces or configuration parameters. The SCOPE model is more about exploring such scope spaces in an informed manner before committing your requirements and software architecture/design and data models to a specific operational scope space and associated operational application contexts.

 

Which brings me to your last two questions. The key challenge for systems of systems is the independence or autonomy of the systems involved, and the many explicit and implicit system boundary scope decisions that went into each. And in many pragmatic cases, these systems were developed by different organizations working under different jurisdictions, business models, purposes/objectives, organizational cultures and are at different stages in their overall life-cycle (which leads to different degrees of willingness or economic motivations for system modification or “evolution” to accommodate the new interaction). The SCOPE model has dimensions for each of these types of factors, as well as others. While there are some systems of systems that have a central “owner” or authority responsible for making them all work together, the degree of centralization or decentralization of control and resource provisioning can be quite variable, even within the lifecycle of a single system of systems, and certainly across some set of systems of systems. So there is a set of SCOPE dimensions to characterize this centralization or lack thereof.

 

Part of the application of SCOPE involves a pre-assessment of a potential target SoS (or capability, operation, enterprise, product line, etc.) to determine what the overall nature and scope of the target might be, and to determine whether additional domain/target-specific scope dimensions might need to be developed. SCOPE is not a closed model and invites extensions into additional dimensions and domains. NCOIC has a guidebook and training material for how to apply SCOPE in specific contexts. NCOIC generally recommends a workshop approach with key stakeholders represented because of the significant social and organizational dynamics that discussing scope boundaries entails. The workshop is facilitated by a trained SCOPE practitioner and structured using a tailored version of the SCOPE model in questionnaire/spreadsheet form.

 

Hope that’s enough to answer your immediate questions and give you a feel for what SCOPE is and isn’t – and maybe would it could become or could be used for in your particular subset of scope space.

 

Hans

 

From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Rich Cooper
Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2015 3:06 PM
To: '[ontolog-forum] ' <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] A Question About Mathematical Logic

 

Hans,

 

I found a reference to your paper

              "Multiplicity of Perspectives, Context Scope, and Context Shifting Events"

 

Apparently your SCOPE work is related to that, as in systems of systems.  I only saw the (free) abstract, but the specification of systems in a computer representation language (Is that what the paper is about?) sounds like the approach I was taking on my reusable software component library.  But the systems were software building blocks, not at in your context, hardware, or communications, or other aspects of full system specification. 

 

The specification of a system's requirements, abstracted by its components' I/O structures, should offer a lot of capability toward automatic generation of software from reused software components, as well as generation of pick lists and connections for the hardware components. 

 

So I like the basic idea (which I admit is just my interpretation of your work).  Could you enlighten us a little more on how you viewed the complexity of planning for systems of systems?

 

Also, please describe how the various development activities leading to the result are coordinated in your planning, given the wide variability of development activities?

 

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 Hans Polzer
Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2015 10:25 AM
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] A Question About Mathematical Logic

 

Rich,

 

I don’t think our experiences have been all that different, but how we look at them and what we emphasize and take away from them might be. Sure, requirements can change in mostly unpredictable ways. But some changes have been fairly easy to predict – and yet the product was designed in a way that didn’t anticipate these changes. I can give lots of real world examples of this from my experience, but I’ll generalize here. The cost of onboard digital storage has and will continue to drop for most applications and devices. The “connectedness” of devices and the ability to connect with other applications, regardless of their execution platform, will continue to increase by significant amounts. The same goes for their owning/sponsoring organizations. Organizations in general will become more global in their sourcing and their markets. More of the operational environment will become accessible and controllable over a network connection, as well as potentially vulnerable to malicious attack/use.

 

Are there likely to be exceptions to these trends? Yes, in niche domains. Are there other general trends that might impact a system or organization’s requirements? Sure. But that is what going through explicit analysis of scope and explicit decision making about scope in a dynamic environment is all about.

 

Hans

 

From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Rich Cooper
Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2015 12:42 PM
To: '[ontolog-forum] ' <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] A Question About Mathematical Logic

 

Dear Hans,

 

You wrote:

I’ll quibble a little with your first point, in part because your own words later in the second sentence undercuts it as well. The problem with requirements is that they do change and adding complexity can help anticipate and ease that change and associated product evolution. Requirements often change because the environment changes (business, technology, social, etc.). Building only to the stated requirements almost guarantees future obsolescence and interoperability problems (although this may be ok depending on the time-scale and cost of re-engineering), not to mention difficulty in reuse components in other systems and contexts (which may also be ok – or not, as the case might be). Sometimes it pays to anticipate future customer requirements, depending on your product set and business model – and the dynamic nature of the environment.

 

Your experiences must be very different from mine.  I've written lots of little programs myself and sold them, but if one person can write a program, it isn't a very complex program anyway. 

 

The experiences I had working in huge organizations (DoD, Hughes, TRW) is that yes, change of requirements is a given because yes, the external constraints change all the time.  However, I disagree that

"adding complexity can help anticipate and ease that change and associated product evolution"

 

In my experience, system designs change, without much ability to predict which changes, prior to the reality of the changes.  Perhaps in slowly evolving products, such as MS Office, or Borland Delphi through the current replacement by some other company (I forget which, but you get the point) an unusually technically knowledgeable management might be able to predict some things about the future requirements, but my experience includes several years working on reusable software back in the 80s.  What I learned after several years of R&D is that concepts like reuse are far trickier in practice than in promise.  The amount of predictable component reuse back then was pretty small.  Now, with object oriented architectures better understood, reuse is only a little bit better. 

 

So, in summary, I think the ability to predict changes of requirements is very limited, and that predicting future requirements is a very risky business strategy. 

 

But I am open to deeper arguments you might want to try about how the structure of software could be further objectized, and better generally useful components for event handling (e.g., a top level event with derived lower level event types having more detail) might be useful. 

 

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 Hans Polzer
Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2015 9:04 AM
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] A Question About Mathematical Logic

 

Rich,

 

I’ll quibble a little with your first point, in part because your own words later in the second sentence undercuts it as well. The problem with requirements is that they do change and adding complexity can help anticipate and ease that change and associated product evolution. Requirements often change because the environment changes (business, technology, social, etc.). Building only to the stated requirements almost guarantees future obsolescence and interoperability problems (although this may be ok depending on the time-scale and cost of re-engineering), not to mention difficulty in reuse components in other systems and contexts (which may also be ok – or not, as the case might be). Sometimes it pays to anticipate future customer requirements, depending on your product set and business model – and the dynamic nature of the environment.

 

Which brings me back to the scope issue. Narrow scope is certainly the correct approach in many contexts, just as broader scope may be appropriate in others. The issue with scope is that too often it is left as vague and implicit rather than as precise and explicit. I don’t think we’ll ever get to a universal set of scales/dimensions for specifying scope, but we should at least work towards such a construct, however messy/pragmatic it might be. The alternative, it seems to me, is this ongoing drive for universality while ignoring the scope issue – if my solution/ontology is universally applicable, then I don’t need to worry about specifying scope. Sure it’s great to have universal truths and principles that one can apply in every possible situation, but that approach doesn’t scale and has limited applicability. It’s a bit like trying to derive fluid dynamics from the quantum mechanics of specific atoms under conditions in which they exhibit fluid behaviors – itself a scope boundary setting challenge.

 

Hans

 

From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Rich Cooper
Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2015 10:45 AM
To: '[ontolog-forum] ' <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] A Question About Mathematical Logic

 

Dear Leo,

 

You wrote:

One can be coherent philosophically about your ontological engineering product, and that product could in fact be very simple, not complex. Or it could be complex. Complexity is not the issue, per se, but the degree of complexity needed for your application(s).

 

Yes, only that degree of complexity which is absolutely needed to meet the requirements of the software should be tolerated in design if the customer user is to be satisfied.  Extra complexities make it harder to use, and harder to maintain as things change, and the product evolves. 

 

Coherency is good, so long as it fits within the user's 7+/-2 chunks.  If adding a philosophical compliance also adds complexity, then the tradeoff loses.  But coherence is really a property of the user's view of the product.  Being a mental object, coherence is nearly impossible to define, other than we don't want inconsistencies in the product. 

 

But given that background from our two emails, can you generally define an outcome based on  your "coherence" ideas which actually improves the user experience?  If there is such a model of coherence that is independent of any user, that would be a very significant outcome.  If you can share some vivid experience about a user's view of coherence, that would help us find a solution to this issue. 

 

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 Obrst, Leo J.
Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2015 6:23 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] A Question About Mathematical Logic

 

One can be coherent philosophically about your ontological engineering product, and that product could in fact be very simple, not complex. Or it could be complex. Complexity is not the issue, per se, but the degree of complexity needed for your application(s). Coherence, however, is always a virtue.  One of the main problems is a priori rejection of knowledge that might make your product better, of more value. Practicality and efficiency are of course of value to engineering, and to ontological engineering. But a bad ontology is like a bad program, however succinct or “fast” it is is besides the point if it is bad.

 

Thanks,

Leo

 

From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Hans Polzer
Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2015 9:52 PM
To: '[ontolog-forum] ' <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] A Question About Mathematical Logic

 

I think you make a good point here, Rich. I’ll be interested to see the other responses to your email. However, this brings back the issue of defining scope in a way that provides some assurance that the ontology in question is being applied within that scope (and assuming the ontology is truly valid throughout the defined scope – which I believe you intended when you said “in all situations”).

 

Hans Polzer

 

From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Rich Cooper
Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2015 9:31 PM
To: 'Thomas Johnston' <tmj44p@xxxxxxx>; '[ontolog-forum] ' <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] A Question About Mathematical Logic

 

Tom,

 

You wrote:

 

I have seen several remarks, by the engineers among us, about ontology and semantics being irrelevant to the work they do, being irrelevant, as you put it, to "real engineering problems". But I have also seen the confusion engineers create when they work with anything other than uncontroversial ontology fragments, e.g. a company's product hierarchy. 

 

No!  You're missing the point about engineering.  Philosophical justifications for ontologies is what I, perhaps among others, disagree with. But the need for an ontology within a complex software architecture, and therefore the need for clear precise semantics for interpreting that ontology's components, in all situations, is a primary engineering concern. 

 

It is only the philosophy part, the attempt to link application ontologies to some overarching totality of existential ontology insisted upon from that philosophical perspective that perturbs this engineer, likely others.  Its adding unnecessary complexity to the architecture of the software, which should be minimized, not expanded. 

 

Every addition of one more component to an ontology drives its complexity up in an exponential curve.  Not a good thing for developing software especially.  So adding even more components having only philosophical justification and not specifically application justification is the wrong direction, IMHO. 

 

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: Thomas Johnston [mailto:tmj44p@xxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2015 6:05 PM
To: Rich Cooper; '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] A Question About Mathematical Logic

 

Rich,

 

Like an earlier comment, yours emphasizes, I believe, the need to discuss (i) the difference between formal ontology and ontology engineering (which is roughly the difference between theory and practice), and (ii) the problems that arise when ontology engineers finding themselves having to do ontology, rather than having to just plug uncontroversial mini-ontologies into some well-defined framework (like Protege) or into a framework/template toolkit like OWL/RDF. I intend to do this in a new thread, and soon.

 

I have seen several remarks, by the engineers among us, about ontology and semantics being irrelevant to the work they do, being irrelevant, as you put it, to "real engineering problems". But I have also seen the confusion engineers create when they work with anything other than uncontroversial ontology fragments, e.g. a company's product hierarchy. 

 

As an ontologist, and a person somewhat familiar with systems of logic, I nonetheless appreciate the importance of getting ontologies into frameworks. That, in my opinion, is what puts the semantics in the Semantic Web -- it gives automated systems, doing cross-database queries, the ability to understand cross-database semantics. (Pat Hayes to correct me, please, if I'm off course here.)

 

An example I have come across in every one of two dozen enterprises I have worked for, is the question: "What is a customer?", where that question, more fully, means "What does your enterprise take a customer of yours to be?" I have never found subject matter experts who have been able to answer that question, without a good deal of help from me. And the help I provide is help in doing ontology clarification work, not help in plugging lexical items representing ontological categories into an ontology tool. Moreover, I have never found two enterprises whose experts defined "customer" in exactly the same way.

 

From which it follows that a cross-database query that assumes that two tables named "Customer Table", in two different enterprise's databases, are both about customers, is almost certain to be mistaken. Both tables may be about fruit, but there is certain to be an apples and oranges issue there. 

 

A formal ontology which includes customers, on the other hand, might be able to distinguish apples from oranges if it could access an ontology framework about customers. Given that the concepts have been correctly and extensively-enough clarified, here is where the ontology engineer proves his worth. 

 

But to define the category Customer clearly enough, it isn't engineering work that needs to be done. It's the far more difficult (in my opinion) ontology clarification work that needs to be done. (I expand on this example in the section "On Using Ontologies", pp. 73-74 in my book Bitemporal Data: Theory and Practice. I think I also elaborated on it a few weeks or months ago, here at Ontolog.)

 

So I think that engineers who suggest that clarifying ontological categories is irrelevant to their work as ontology engineers, are mistaken. Such work seems mistaken to them, I think, because most of the ontologies they put into their well-defined frameworks are relatively trivial, i.e. are ontologies that subject matter experts have no trouble agreeing on. The lower-level the ontologies we engineer, the more that will tend to be the case. 

 

But ascend into mid-level or upper-level ontologies, and ontology engineers get lost, and don't know how to find a clear path through the forest whose trees are those categories. And so instead of admitting "We're lost", they say instead "We strayed into a swamp that has nothing to do with the real engineering work we do -- which turns out to be the relatively straightforward work of plugging labels for uncontroversial ontological categories, and taxonomies thereof, into Protege or its like". 

 

I say, on the contrary, that conceptual clarification work in mid- and upper-level ontologies have everything to do with ontology engineering, and are where the really difficult work of that engineering is done. An analogy: machine-tooling parts is the hard work of manufacturing; assembling those parts is the easy work.

 

And my apologies to Leo, Pat and other whose comments on my question I have not yet responded to. I will, and soon. And I thank them and all other respondents for helping me think through the question I raised.

 

Tom

 

 

On Tuesday, October 13, 2015 12:52 PM, Rich Cooper <metasemantics@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

 

Although the approach you are suggesting might entertain some philosophical questions, and therefore be entertaining to philosophers, it has little or no relevance to real engineering problems, which almost never are applied to the actual universe of every possible entity - i.e. infinite supplies.

 

In engineering applications, Ex(...) would normally apply only to finite sized, or traversably infinite sized, problems.  The importance of scope in engineering, i.e., where you draw the lines around what is a system, which contains all the entities, enumerators of variables, constants and functions in real problems. 

 

Even unbounded engineering problems have limits to the possible types that can be used, though mechanisms like stacks, or even Turing machines with infinite square supplies, attempt to approximate boundless sizes. 

 

So I suggest your title should be A Question About Mathematical Logic, since engineers who consider themselves logic designers would find the ideas impractical, though linguists might be more interested.  

 

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

 

From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Thomas Johnston
Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2015 8:59 AM
To: Thomas Johnston; [ontolog-forum]; [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] A Question About Logic

 

Paragraph 2 should read:

 

Suppose someone else asserts, instead, that "No dogs are renates". Certainly, to do that, that person must believe that there are such things as dogs and, in addition, believe that none of them are renates (a false belief, of course).

 

Sorry for the slip-up.

 

Tom

 

 

On Tuesday, October 13, 2015 11:57 AM, Thomas Johnston <tmj44p@xxxxxxx> wrote:

 

Oct 13, 2017.

 

My intuitions tell me that anyone who asserts "All dogs are renates" believes that there are dogs (i.e. is ontologically committed to the existence of dogs) just as much as someone who asserts "Some dogs are friendly".

 

Suppose someone else asserts, instead, that "No dogs are renates". Certainly, to do that, that person must believe that there are such things as dogs and, in addition, believe that some of them are not renates (a false belief, of course).

 

Now for "Some dogs are friendly", and also "Some dogs are not friendly". In both cases, we all seem to agree, someone making those assertions believes that there are dogs.

 

Now I'm quite happy about all this. If I make a Gricean-rule serious assertion by using either the "All" quantification or the "Some" quantification, I'm talking about whatever is the subject term in those quantifications – dogs in this case. I'm particularly happy that negation, as it appears in the deMorgan's translations between "All" statements and "Some" statements, doesn't claim that a pair of statements are semantically equivalent, in which one of the pair expresses a belief that dogs exist but the other does not.

 

But in the standard interpretation of predicate logic, that is the interpretation. In the standard interpretation, negating a statement creates or removes the _expression_ of a belief that something exists. My beliefs in what exist can't be changed by the use of the negation operator. Apparently, John's beliefs can, and so too for everyone else who feels comfortable with predicate logic as a formalization of commonsense reasoning, and with the interpretation of one of its operators as "There exists ....".

 

I usually don't like getting into tit for tats. Those kinds of discussions always are about trees, and take attention away from the forest. But I'll make exceptions when I think it's worth taking that risk (as I did in my response to Ed last night).

 

So:

 

From John Sowa's Oct 12th response:

<<<  

TJ
> why, in the formalization of predicate logic, was it decided
> that "Some X" would carry ontological commitment

Nobody made that decision.  It's a fact of perception.  Every
observation can always be described with just two operators:
existential quantifier and conjunction. No other operators can
be observed. They can only be inferred.

>>>  

(1) If all ontological commitments have to be based on direct observation, then we're right back to the Vienna Circle and A. J. Ayer.

 

(2) And what is it that we directly observe? A dog in front of me? Dogs, as Quine once pointed out, are ontological posits on a par with the Greek gods, or with disease-causing demons. (I am aware that this point, in particular, will likely serve to reinforce the belief, on the part of many engineering types in this forum, that philosophy has nothing to do with ontology engineering. That's something I want to discuss in a "contextualizing discussion" I want to have before I pester the members of this forum with questions and hypotheses about cognitive/diachronic semantics. What does talk like that have to do with building real-world ontologies in ontology tools, in OWL/RDF – ontologies that actually do something useful in the world?

 

(3) I wouldn't talk about some dogs unless I believed that some dogs exist. And if some dogs exist, then all dogs do, too. Either there are dogs, or there aren't. If there are, then I can talk about some of them, or about all of them. If there aren't, then unless I am explicitly talking about non-existent things, I can't talk about some of them nor can I talk about all of them, for the simple reason that none of them exist. To repeat myself: if any of them exist, then all of them do.

 

(4) And I am, of course, completely aware that trained logicians since Frege have been using predicate logic, and that, at least since deMorgan, have been importing to negation the power to create and remove ontological commitment.

 

(5) Here's a quote from Paul Vincent Spade (very important guy in medieval logic and semantics):

 

"This doctrine of “existential import” has taken a lot of silly abuse in the twentieth century. As you may know, the modern reading of universal affirmatives construes them as quantified material conditionals. Thus ‘Every S is P’ becomes (x)(Sx Px), and is true, not false, if there are no S’s. Hence (x)(Sx Px) does not imply (x)(Sx). And that is somehow supposed to show the failure of existential import. But it doesn’t show anything of the sort .... "

 

So Spade approaches this as the issue of the existential import of universally quantified statements. He points out that, from Ux(Dx --> Rx), we cannot infer Ex(Dx & Rx). The rest of the passage attempts to explain why. I still either don't understand his argument, or I'm not convinced by it. Why should "All dogs are renates" not be expressed as Ux(Dx & Rx)?

 

From John's reply, I think he would say that it's because we can only observe particular things; we can't observe all things. But in the preceding points, I've tried to say why I don't find that convincing.

 

(6) Simply the fact that decades of logicians have not raised the concerns I have raised strongly suggests that I am mistaken, and need to think more clearly about logic and ontological commitment. But there is something that might make one hesitate to jump right to that conclusion. It's Kripke's position on analytic a posteriori statements (which I have difficulty distinguishing from Kant's synthetic a priori statements, actually -- providing we assume that the metaphors of "analytic" as finding that one thing is "contained in" another thing, and of "synthetic" as bringing together two things first experienced as distinct, are just metaphors, and don't work as solid explanations).

 

All analytic statements are "All" statements, not "Some" statements. Kripke suggests that the statement "Water is H2O" is analytic but a posteriori. In general, that "natural kind" statements are all of this sort. Well, a posteriori statements are ones verified by experience, and so that would take care of John's Peircean point that only "Some" statements are grounded in what we experience.

 

I don't know how solid this line of thought is. But if there is something to it, that might suggest that if we accept Kripke's whole referential semantics / rigid designator / natural kinds ideas (cf. Putnam's twin earth thought experiment also), then perhaps we should rethink the traditional metalogical interpretation of "All dogs are renates" as Ux(Dx --> Rx), and consider, instead, Ux(Dx & Rx).

 

Well, two summing-up points. The first is that Paul Vincent Spade thinks that my position is "silly", and John Sowa thinks that it's at least wrong. The second is that such discussions do indeed take us beyond the concerns of ontology engineers, who just want to get on with building working ontologies.

 

As I said above, I will address those concerns of ontology engineers before I begin discussing cognitive semantics in this Ontolog (Ontology + Logic) forum.

 

Regards to all,

 

Tom

 

 

 

 

On Monday, October 12, 2015 10:49 PM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

 

Tom, Ed, Leo, Paul, Henson,

TJ
> why, in the formalization of predicate logic, was it decided
> that "Some X" would carry ontological commitment

Nobody made that decision.  It's a fact of perception.  Every
observation can always be described with just two operators:
existential quantifier and conjunction. No other operators can
be observed. They can only be inferred.

EJB
> I was taught formal logic as a mathematical discipline, not
> a philosophical discipline. I do not believe that mathematics
> has any interest in ontological commitment.

That's true.  And most of the people who developed formal logic
in the 20th c were mathematicians.  They didn't worry about
the source or reliability of the starting axioms.

Leo
> most ontologists of the realist persuasion will argue that there
> are no negated/negative ontological things.

Whatever their persuasion, nobody can observe a negation.  It's
always an inference or an assumption.

PT
> on the inadequacy of mathematical logic for reasoning about
> the real world, see Veatch, "Intentional Logic: a logic based on
> philosophical realism".

Many different logics can be and have been formalized for various
purposes.  They may have different ontological commitments built in,
but the distinction of what is observed or inferred is critical.

HG
> I keep wondering if this forum has anything useful to offer the
> science and engineering community.

C. S. Peirce was deeply involved in experimental physics and
engineering.  He was also employed as an associate editor of the
_Century Dictionary_, for which he wrote, revised, or edited over
16,000 definitions.  My comments below are based on CSP's writings:

  1. Any sensory perception is evidence that something exists;
    a simultaneous perception of something A and something B
    is evidence for (Ex)(Ey)(A(x) & B(y)).

  2. Evidence for other operators must *always* be an inference:

    (a) Failure to observe P(x) does not mean there is no P.

        Example:  "There is no hippopotamus in this room"
        can only be inferred iff you have failed to observe
        a hippo and know that it is big enough that you would
        certainly have noticed one if it were present.

    (b) (p or q) cannot be directly observed.  But you might infer
        that a particular observation (e.g. "the room is lighted")
        could be the result of two or more sources.

    (c) (p implies q) cannot be observed, as Hume discussed at length.

    (d) a universal quantifier can never be observed.  No matter
        how many examples of P(x) you see, you can never know that
        you've seen them all (unless you have other information
        that guarantees you have seen them all).

TJ
> But now notice something: negation creates and removes ontological
> commitment. And this seems really strange. Why should negation do this?

The commitment is derived from the same background knowledge that
enabled you to assert (or prevented you from asserting) the negation.

> I'd also like to know if there are formal logics which do not
> impute this extravagant power of ontological commitment /
> de-commitment to the negation operator in predicate logics.

Most formal logicians don't think about these issues -- for the
simple reason that most of them are mathematicians.  They don't
think about observation and evidence.

CSP realized the problematical issues with negation, but he also
knew that he needed to assume at least one additional operator.
And negation was the simplest of the lot.  Those are the three
he assumed for his existential graphs.  (But he later added
metalanguage, modality, and three values -- T, F, and Unknown.)

John

PS:  The example "There is no hippopotamus in this room" came from
a remark by Bertrand Russell that he couldn't convince Wittgenstein
that there was no hippopotamus in the room.  Russell didn't go
into any detail, but I suspect that Ludwig W. was trying to
explain the point that a negation cannot be observed.

 

 

 

 


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