At 05:58 PM 1/18/2006, you wrote:
>Pat,
>
>Thanks for helping us get rid of the giant cc list.
>
>Now some comments on terminology:
>
> > [PC] modestly accepting what I believe is a reference
> > to my frequent use of the term "concept", please understand
> > that I fully sympathize with Barry's emphasis on the need
> > to distinguish between real things in the world and the
> > concepts people have of them and the terms by which we refer
> > to them.
>
>Barry and I are both happy with the word "type", but I realize
>that there are many different, but related kinds of types.
>In formal definitions, I use the unadorned word "type", but in
>more informal discussions, I adopt the common English approach of
>concatenating two related words, as in "hound dog" or "soda pop".
>
>For example, one could say "concept type" or "relation type" or
>"concept and relation types". Purists can ignore the modifiers,
>but they may help clarify the topic under discussion. (01)
I think we should just allow 'concept' as a term of art of ontology
to die a natural death, for reasons summarized e.g. here:
http://ontology.buffalo.edu/bfo/Beyond_Concepts.pdf (02)
'Concept' belongs at best to linguistics or psychology. (03)
I think that there are relational types, e.g. conversation, war,
battle, argument, interview, attraction. However, I think it wrong to
coin a term 'relation type'. This is because most of the relations
which interest us here, e.g. is_a (meaning: is subtype of),
instance_of, part_of, etc., DO NOT HAVE INSTANCES. In this they are
distinct from most of the types which interest us here (e.g. object,
quality, class (meaning: extension of a type); dog, mammal, person,
organisation, country ...). (04)
> > I need a term that means "a class or relation or function or instance
> > or metaclass or function term or axiom or procedural rule or attached
> > method or any other element that we would want to put into an ontology
> > that represents some element of meaning, as distinct from the actual
> > things in the world to which they refer and as distinct from the
> > specific manner in which they happen to be represented." or "some
> > abstract entity which is represented by symbols in our ontologies,
> > is intended to correspond in structure to some idea people have about
> > something or other, and refers to something other than itself".
>
>I believe that the word "type" could be used for all the categories
>in the ontology and "instance" for anything of a given type. (05)
Yes.
But given that there are elements of the ontology (e.g. the relations
listed above) which do not have instances, not all the elements of
the ontology are types.
BS (06)
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