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Re: [uom-ontology-std] uom-ontology-std - strawman UML - scale

To: "Pat Hayes" <phayes@xxxxxxx>
Cc: uom-ontology-std <uom-ontology-std@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "ingvar_johansson" <ingvar.johansson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:44:33 +0200 (CEST)
Message-id: <60223.83.254.149.25.1250171073.squirrel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Pat H wrote:    (01)

> Our purpose here is NOT to further the art of metrology, but to create an
> ontology. By definition, such an ontology is a formal description - in
> a formalism - of the concepts we are here discussing. I do not care
> whether or not this is viewed as a 'reduction' , but it WILL be
> couched ONLY in logic. (If, that is, it ever gets done, which I am
> beginning to doubt.) If you find this unsatisfactory,    (02)

No, I don't.    (03)

> or if your
> methodological intuitions lead you to be uncomfortable with it,    (04)

No, I am not.    (05)

> then
> you should perhaps not be engaged in this effort.    (06)

I do not regard myself as engaged in this effort, only in trying to make
its point of departure clear. I have mainly tried to correct what I regard
as partial misunderstandings of what traditional metrologists have said,
and what is said in the VIM and the SI system. At the beginning of the
discussion, I also hoped to get some comments on my paper "Two Changes in
the International System of Units?", which has been refused by the journal
"Metrologia". In fact, my proposal to delete 'dimension one' seems to me,
interestingly, not to fly in the face of anything that has been said in
the discussion here.    (07)

> I myself will find
> it vastly more satisfying than endless discussions in English which
> come to no conclusion. However, I have no more spare time to spend on
> this now, and will not for some weeks.
>
> If I might make a general observation before leaving: I have the sense
> from these discussions that several of us have a feeling that the
> ontologists in this forum are straying from the correct methodological
> path of metrology. And of course they - we - are, because writing an
> ontology of metrology is not doing metrology. (One can substitute
> almost any other science or human activity for 'metrology' in that
> sentence). In this effort, metrologists or philosophers of metrology
> are what are technically known as SMEs: Subject Matter Experts. Your
> job is to tell us what your concepts are, not to instruct us in how to
> write axioms    (08)

I agree.    (09)

> or to debate the philosophical foundations of our
> technical area.    (010)

I disagree; it ought to be a joint work.    (011)

> This is not the place to be having a debate in the
> philosophy of logic.
>
> See y'all in September.    (012)

Have a nice holiday,
Ingvar
-- 
home page: http://hem.passagen.se/ijohansson/index.html    (013)


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