why not provide the translation form the German? (01)
Peter Kugler, one of Rosen's students, made a short comment on Rosen (02)
http://www.ontologystream.com/beads/nationalDebate/304.htm (03)
Cjris, you are confusing the earily Wittgenstein from the later
Wittgenstein. He himself made it clear that the clear position in Tractatus
was incorrect. (04)
The additional idea of a lattice of models ordered by deductive mechanisms
was tarski (I believe) and others, not Wittgenstein. I do not think that
you will find him speaking anywhere about an infiinte set of models. (05)
Language games was an "invention" of Wittgenstein's in his later years in
order that he could say , as is said in Topic Maps that there is a referent
"out there" which cannot be put into a one to one correspondance to the
token in language (his first statment in the Tractatus). (06)
Now look, I do not have my library with me.... and I may be incorrect as to
how I have organized my understanding of Wittgenstein. (07)
But the "language games" is late Wittgenstein and the one to one
correspondance is the early. (08)
The Topic Maps adopted the later Wittgenstein and the W3C adopted the early. (09)
Now someone who I respect once told me that he did not agree with the above
characterization of the differences between Topic Maps and RDF... I never
understood why he disagreed, but I am still listening to get my own
understanding in proper order. (010)
I ask that all in the forum read the short paper by G Edelman: (011)
http://www.jbc.org/cgi/content/full/279/9/7361 (012)
and think about his life long struggle to define a specfic alternative to
the notion that were popular when he started his career. The alternative
was that the immune system, in fact all of biological activities/processes,
were purely instructional. This notion was advanced by Linus Pauling.
Pauling and other were forceful in stating science in these terms, without
ever having a final proof that instructions existed for all biolgical
processes. Edelman had an internal drive because he read the two central
figures in theoritical immunology (Burnet and Jerene) as suggesting
something else. (013)
The divide between Darwinian and non-Darwinian ways of thinking is NOT the
way to look at Edelman's work, as he himself represents the pressure of
evolution as having a structural ordering .... (014)
Polemics are created in great abundance by those who have not done their
homework and have not been completely open. Edelman himself talks in this
2005 paper about his awareness of the blind-spot that WE all have. Perhaps
it is by recognizing that we have a blind spot that we can remain open to
evidence and not argue based on how we would like the conclusions to be. (015)
Some folks in the W3C camp really want to say that Topic Maps has nothing of
value that OWL does not already have. The early verses late Wittgenstein is
one way I have seen that there is a authoritarian viewpoint (the W3C or
Pauling or Tarski) and then there is one which is attempting to deal with
the degeneracy (Edelman's word) found in biological induction (see previous
post) (016)
http://www.ontologystream.com/beads/nationalDebate/301.htm (017)
IN my mediations last night I realized that the discussion in this ONTAC
working group eforum had come to the point where progress is generally
stopped by some type of agreement not to flame each other over philosophical
issues. (018)
I hope that we can instead may a transformation of the discussion in the
direction that John Sowa and I are setting up. (019)
Paul Prueitt (020)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontac-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontac-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Chris Menzel
Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2005 7:26 AM
To: ONTAC-WG General Discussion
Subject: Re: [ontac-forum] Theories, Models, Reasoning, Language, and
Truth (021)
On Wed, Dec 14, 2005 at 09:13:36PM -0500, John Sowa wrote:
> ...
> One point I wanted to emphasize is that natural languages are far more
> complex than many people have assumed. In particular, many of the
> ontologies that have been proposed can be viewed as implementations of
> Wittgenstein's first book, the _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_.
>
> In his later book, the _Philosophical Investigations_, W. criticized
> the "grave errors" of his first book. I am convinced that
> Wittgenstein's second book is a much sounder basis for ontology than
> his first book. In effect, W's first book proposed one giant
> "language game" represented by one giant theory -- much like many
> currently proposed ontologies. Many of the AI systems implemented in
> the 1970s and '80s could be viewed as direct implementations of W's
> first book. As I argued in the knowledge soup paper (see below), I
> believe that approach is doomed.
>
> In W's second book, he argued for an open-ended number of language
> games. (022)
Just as a matter of (for purposes here) completely irrelevant exegesis,
I can't think of a shred of evidence in TLP for the idea that there is
"one giant theory". TLP does contain a single, very influential theory
of *meaning*, viz., the "picture" theory, according to which a sentence
has meaning insofar as its internal structural corresponds in a certain
way to the structure of the objects denoted by its referring terms. And
his purpose was to circumscribe thereby the *limits* of language, and in
particular its powerlessness for expressing and answering questions
concerning what is in fact most important in life, questions of life's
meaning, questions about the good and the beautiful. Thus the towering,
and ultimately tragic, proposition with which W. closes the book: "Wovon
man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen!" (Toulmin and
Janik's superb book _Wittgenstein's Vienna_, which situates the
development of TLP in its broader cultural milieu, is essential reading
on this point.) (023)
It is of course true, as you note, that W. roundly rejected the TLP in
the Philosophical Investigations, but your characterization above
suggests that his major critique consisted in rejecting the idea of "one
giant 'lanuage game', represented by one giant theory", in favor of
many, as in your lattice of theories. But this is seriously misleading.
For PI is a rejection, not of the idea of one giant theory, but of the
whole idea that meaning is representation. He would reject your lattice
of theories -- all of them representational in nature -- as emphatically
as a single giant theory. His phrase "language game" was meant to
underscore this, as games are things people *do*; meaning, according to
the Wittgenstein of PI, consists not in the fact that sentences
represent a (purported) objective external world, but in what they are
*used* for. In TLP, sentences are mirrors; in PI, they are tools. (024)
Me, I think W. pretty much got it right in TLP. ;-) (025)
Chris Menzel (026)
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