I entirely agree with everything you say here, John. (01)
Pat (02)
On Aug 7, 2009, at 8:46 PM, John F. Sowa wrote: (03)
> Pat,
>
> I don't disagree with your main points, but I wanted to add a few
> qualifications.
>
> PH> But not all ontologies need be about the physical world; and
>> even those that are, need not conceptualize it the way that physical
>> sciences do. As many folk in this forum will attest, our own human
>> language carves the world up in ways that do not make scientific
>> sense.
>
> The main qualification is that our human languages carve up the world
> in whatever way the speaker or author chooses. Since a big language
> like English has a lot of speakers, it supports many different ways
> of carving up the world -- including every way that any scientist has
> ever adopted.
>
> But I'll admit that the English tenses are biased toward a 3-D
> perspective by speakers who are experiencing an immediate present,
> a remembered past, and an unknown, but imaginable future. If you
> think of that perspective in terms of a relativistic "light cone",
> you can map it into a 4-D view in the same way that a relativistic
> light cone is related to the full 4-D system.
>
> PH> I would add by way of keeping an open mind on the subject,
>> it is in common cause with some current theoretical physicists,
>> who have been casting doubt on the very notion of time being
>> a dimension like space: see for example Lee Smolin's entertaining
>> book "The Trouble with Physics".
>
> For reasons like that, I don't believe that we can or should define
> a single universal deeply axiomatized ontology of everything. Even
> people who have studied relativity and quantum mechanics still use
> Newtonian mechanics for the sizes and speeds that people ordinarily
> experience. For such things, it's pointless to use relativity or
> QM because any extra precision would be swamped by the inevitable
> errors in measurement.
>
> To get back to the UoM topics: physicists (and ordinary people)
> use the same words and units of measurement for Newtonian mechanics
> and the many newer variants that were developed during the 20th
> century. However, the equations that relate those measurements
> have become more complex. That is why I would keep equations
> like F=ma or E=mc^2 out of the upper level ontology. I would
> put them in lower-level microtheories that could be invoked
> for solving particular problems.
>
> But note that the definition of 1 inch = 2.54 cm is independent
> of and holds for any version of physics. Therefore, it can go
> in a separate microtheory that can be combined with multiple
> theories of physics.
>
> John
>
>
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> (04)
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