Re: SUO: KIF syntax and semantics and a basic ontology
David,
I agree with you (and John V.) tha time is extremely
important for any ontology:
>I think it would be impossible to to be time-neutral.
>It does make sense to talk about axioms that exist for all-time, (ie:
>eternal, unchanging) or axioms that don't mention time. I'm just convinced
>that time is something that you can't be agnostic/neutral about.
>There is an interaction with time whether you like it or not.
>At best we define 'base assumptions' that specify a default for what that
>interaction will be with our axioms.
However, the notion of time that we as 21st century clock
watchers accept as almost second nature is very much a recent
development in the long history of human nature (and the
languages that human beings have spoken for millennia).
Much more fundamental to the languages we all speak is
the notion of something I'll call "context", which is the
inescapable background -- the omnipresent here and now --
of every moment of our lives. It's the reference point of
the verbs and adverbs of our natural languages, and it's the
universal t=0 of physics, engineering, and rocket launches.
The idea of measuring time is also important, as we can see
from monuments like Stonehenge, cave paintings of phases of
the moon, and the universal references to the sun and moon
in the temporal words of every language on earth. But those
words are secondary: they are qualifiers on the verbs and
clauses that express the context or situation.
Bottom line: Yes, time is important, but the units and
coordinate systems for measuring time are qualifiers that help
identify the context or situation. We must make provision
for representing context in our systems of logic; then we can
attach time and space coordinates to those contexts and link
them in causal sequences that reflect (and I would say are the
basis for) the temporal order.
John Sowa