Dear Matthew, Deborah, et al., (01)
This thread is getting into (or perhaps drowning in) some very thorny
issues that are typically ignored by philosophers who think of ontology
as an academic study of what exists in the world. (02)
MW
> By the way, measurements look easy from the outside, but once you
> lift the lid, you find all kinds of interesting things there you can
> easily get tripped up by – another reason for not reinventing. (03)
Scientists beat their heads against those issues for centuries.
By the turn of the 19th to the 20th, Peirce, Mach, Boltzmann,
Planck, Einstein, and others recognized that the methods of
measurement are fundamentally intertwined with the answers. (04)
With quantum mechanics, physicists realized that measurement
and existence are interrelated in more complex ways than anyone
had imagined. Psychologists and sociologists are even more
concerned about how their data and their methods are related. (05)
Sports data: Note the story about three umpires in a bar after
a baseball game, discussing the ontology of balls and strikes: (06)
First umpire: "I call 'em as I see 'em." (07)
Second umpire: "I call 'em as they are." (08)
Third umpire: "They ain't nothin' til I call 'em." (09)
DMP
> Depending on the domain, or need for cross disciplinary discussion,
> many on the IP-protected side have no interest in supporting, or
> will even actively stops progress, on a common model. There is also
> the problem of failed common models that do not work, will not
> accommodate different object definitions - from software to software
> or industry model to industry model - without loss of data or functionality... (010)
This issue can be controlled to some extent, but it will never be
eliminated. There are too many good reasons, bad reasons, business
reasons, political reasons, engineering reasons, and scientific reasons.
The story about the three umpires is true of every field. (011)
God may have a perfect ontology of the universe. But nobody on earth
does, and nobody has enough power to enforce one. Therefore, the best
we can do is to have an underspecified upper level with an open-ended
hierarchy of microtheories beneath it. (012)
John (013)
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