Dear John, (01)
You've said this more than once, so I'm going to pick you up on it here: (02)
> the upper level
> is much less important than the middle levels, and most of the
> axioms necessary for any practical problem are in the lowest
> levels of the microtheories. (03)
This does not accord with my experience at least. I find 3 key relations
that turn up in any upper ontology that are important at any level, and
particularly in a 4D ontology turn up everywhere. These are: (04)
- Whole-part
- Class-member
- Superclass-subclass (05)
There are also various classes of these that are also useful and belong at
this level. (06)
I will grant that there is not much else, but I find that these are much
more important than anything else at this or any other level. So I think
you should be more careful about such sweeping statements. (07)
Regards (08)
Matthew (09)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontac-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:ontac-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
> Sent: 18 May 2006 13:28
> To: ONTAC-WG General Discussion
> Subject: Re: [ontac-forum] John Sowa
>
>
> Barry and Christopher,
>
> Yes, I admit that I was using a rhetorical technique
> to emphasize the point and that the word "metaphysics"
> is a later coinage:
>
> BS> Aristotle never used the term 'metaphysics' (which was
> > almost certainly introduced by the librarians of Alexandria,
> > for those treatises which came after the treatises in
> > physics on their library shelves). Rather, Aristotle used
> > the term 'first philosophy', which rather suggests that he
> > was on Azamat's side.
>
> Nevertheless, the so-called "first philosophy" never comes
> first in a child's early stages of language learning. When
> children learn new words, it is always from a posteriori
> experience, not from a priori assumptions. Even in mathematics,
> in which the axioms are assumed a priori before the deduction
> begins, the discovery methods used by mathematicians to find
> new axioms are based on analogies with a posteriori experience.
>
> BS> How, I wonder, would John have responded to Newton, had he
> > been around when he published his Principia Mathematics?
> > "Oh, Isaac, we don't disagree about the goals. My only point
> > is that we still have a long way to go before we reach them.
> > Perhaps we might get there in a few more centuries, or perhaps
> > it may take billions of years. Nobody knows. ...'
>
> My attitude toward any new theory that explains a wide range
> of data is the same: It's a great achievement. But as we have
> seen, no great theory lasts forever. And with the quickening
> pace of modern science, a long lifetime for a theory is closer
> to 30 years than 300 years. An example is the "standard" model
> for the subatomic particles, which was formulated in the '70s
> and which is now seriously threatened by the discovery that
> neutrinos have mass. As I said, nobody knows whether any
> empirical hypothesis will stand the test of time.
>
> CS> Isn't there a middle way? How about an upper ontology
> > for human-universal pragmatics (if I may risk miscommunication
> > with that choice of words...)? Something like this :-
> >
> > The upper ontology asymptote we might first seek would be
> > one which frames the overall structures, uniformities,
> > patterns, laws and constraints in the human knowledge discovery
> > and creation process as we currently find it, so as to better
> > enable collaboration (better than the previous version, that is)
> > between all the various overlapping and intermingled bodies of
> > people presently on planet Earth.
>
> That's a very important point. When I finished my KR book in
> 1999, I still had hopes for a conventional ontology with a fairly
> stable upper level. But all the wrangling in the SUO community,
> with competing groups demonstrating that they could pick and choose
> different upper levels while still developing useful lower-level
> theories, convinced me that Doug Lenat was right: the upper level
> is much less important than the middle levels, and most of the
> axioms necessary for any practical problem are in the lowest
> levels of the microtheories.
>
> I was also impressed by the fact that the wrangling groups could
> all agree on aligning their so-called "formal" ontologies with
> the very informal WordNet, which was derived from the vague and
> ambiguous natural language that Frege, Russell, and Carnap were
> trying to replace.
>
> I have always had a much higher respect for NLs than the Fregean
> crowd, but my respect has been steadily increasing. In fact,
> I would now claim that the vagueness and ambiguities of NLs are
> certainly not defects, but essential properties of any medium of
> expression that can, as Christopher says, "enable collaboration...
> between all the various overlapping and intermingled bodies of
> people presently on planet Earth."
>
> Therefore, my current recommendation (which I have been stating
> in various ways for the past year or two) is to have a sparsely
> axiomatized type hierarchy that would be closer to a cleaned-up
> version of WordNet than to any of the popular proposals for
> formal ontologies. In fact, I would say that the upper level
> should have no empirical axioms whatever. The only axioms
> should be what Carnap called "analytic" -- the definitions or
> "meaning postulates" that distinguish one type from another.
>
> In this sense, the upper levels could be called "first philosophy"
> because they could never be falsified by any a posteriori empirical
> facts. The lower levels, which may contain many axioms derived
> from empirical data, would draw upon the upper levels as a source
> of useful distinctions. But to allow for the inevitable revisions
> that take place with progress in science and engineering, the
> lower levels would be compartmentalized in a wide range of problem
> or task-oriented microtheories.
>
> As for collaboration and interoperability, both people and computer
> systems never require a global alignment of all their categories.
> It is only necessary to agree on those low-level categories that
> characterize the specific problem or task. That is how people
> have been interoperating for millennia, and that is how computer
> systems have been interoperating for the past 50 years.
>
> In short, to promote interoperability, focus on the messages that
> two agents (human or computer) use to communicate about the task.
> Then align the microtheories that characterize those messages.
> Categories that are irrelevant to the task need not (and probably
> should not) be involved in the process of alignment for that task.
>
> John Sowa
>
>
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