Tom Gruber wrote:
> John Sowa wrote:
>> 1. I don't believe that the definitions in philosophy and
>> computer science differ in any significant way.
>> 3. If possible, we should adopt a common definition that
>> is acceptable to both fields
>
> The draft document is written as a logical walk down a set of
> distinctions, so that we could discuss the source of disagreements
> and clearly identify the point of departure. John's objections to
> the first and most fundamental distinction (philosophy vs. computer
> science word senses) makes evident the reason why certain topics
> are never "put to rest" by philosophers and other dialectic sportsmen. (01)
This is a just cheap potshot. Very tacky. (02)
> To say there is no difference between what a professor of
> Aristotelian ontology means by ontology and what a bioinformatics
> computer scientist managing a gene database means is absurd. (03)
It just ain't so. Both the philosophical ontologies past and present
and modern web ontologies are attempts to organize our experience
theoretically by identifying certain fundamental categories of things
and the principles that characterize them. At root -- focusing on
*content*, not representation -- there are only two notable
differences between (most) philosophical ontologies and web
ontologies: (1) Scope and (2) the assumption of realism. Re (1),
most web ontologies have a more limited scope (e.g., the human
genome) that many philosophers would consider part of some more
specialized science. (Though many would not, especially these days
-- the philosopher W.V. Quine, for example, thought that the only
legitimate source of ontological knowledge was the physical
sciences.) Re (2), as you yourself note, many, though certainly not
all, philosophical ontologies have been attempts to characterize the
structure of "big-R" Reality. And there certainly is overall a much
more pragmatic, even skeptical view among modern web ontologists
about whether or not their ontologies reflect anything about Reality
per se. But the fact is, many folks working on web ontologies (gene
ontologies being a notable example) *do* believe that their
ontologies are accurate reflections of Reality, albeit with respect
to a more specialized, concrete domain than a traditional
philosophical ontology. Second, though, the assumption of realism,
while arguably a useful methodological principle, is completely
irrelevant to the assessment of an ontology. Even in philosophy,
ontologies are judged by their effectiveness at solving problems,
whether philosophical, conceptual, or computational. The ontologies
that endure are the ones that most effectively solve the problems at
hand. If one wishes to infer from its effectiveness that a given
ontology is big-T True, that's fine, but, for web ontologies
especially, it has no practical upshot. So this distinction between
philosophical ontologies and web ontologies isn't even especially
relevant. (04)
> There is a new word sense for ontology, just as there are new word
> senses for other technical terms in computer science: process,
> client, server, etc. While my training in philosophy is surely
> inferior, I would dare say (with no loss of irony) that John's
> argument makes an ontological category error. The Ontologies of
> philosophy are theories, ideas, ways of thinking about the world,
> and arguments about the nature of Reality. The ontologies that are
> the subject of W3C standards, manipulated by software, and used to
> represent huge stores of data in databases are material, concrete,
> objective documents in the same category as programs, database
> schemata, and other digitally stored representations. (05)
I think it is you who is making the category mistake here. You are
confusing the *content* of an ontology with its representation. It
is the *form* in which a web ontology is expressed -- notably, OWL --
that is subject to W3C standards and manipulated by software. But
the content of the data and documents they are used to express
reflects some organization of the information in some domain
according to basic categories and principles -- just like a
philosophical ontology. (06)
> There is a reason why a lot of people have stopped reading this
> list. It is because of this style of long-winded argument by
> attrition. (07)
Have you done a survey to confirm your claim here? Or is it based on
a few anecdotes and your own personal feelings? If the latter, it is
irresponsible and unjustified rhetoric. (08)
Chris Menzel (09)
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