SUO: Re: Formal SUMO Draft -- *Date 03 Feb 2002
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JA = Jon Awbrey
RS = Randall Schulz
JA: In my opinion it is a fundamental mistake to specify
a particular logical language, for example, KIF or
any other, as a part of the compliance conditions.
This would be as bad a practice as stipulating
that a compliant ontology has to be written in
English as opposed to French or German, or to
use an even more notorious analogy, that
a program has to be written in ADA.
JA: Requirements should be specified at a higher level
of abstraction and generality than any particular
ontology oriented logical formalism.
JA: Among the more deleterious side-effects of
thinking in only one language is a constant
tendency to confuse that language with reality.
RS: I do not agree.
RS: KIF neither imposes or implies any particular ontological
commitments nor does it dictate any particular logical or
inferential systems. It is lax about things like strict
separation of function and relation symbols and does not
itself demand a single arity for each function or relation.
It permits constructions that go beyond first-order logic.
But all those restrictions 'can' be imposed by its users
or by implementations.
RS: I do not see what's to be gained (or, even, what is meant) by
specifying requirements "at a higher level of abstraction".
In fact, requirements specifications are scarcely more
tolerant of ambiguity and informal constructs than are
computer programs, ontologies, or proofs themselves.
RS: The tendency to confuse descriptions with the described
("the map is not the terrain") is a property of human
cognition (of sloppy thinking, at that), and is not
principally a property or effect of the language or
the style of description.
RS: As it stands, the SUO-KIF requirement is not much more than
a statement that the Ontology shall be written in prefix form
using a Lisp-like S-Expression syntax plus some minimal dictates
on the lexical patterns used to separate numbers from variables
from named entities and some commitments about how quantifiers
are notated. It's hard to see how this curtails, constrains
or distorts ontological thinking or options or how it would
impair the ability of participants to fulfill the substantive
goals of the SUO endeavor.
RS: I'm inclined to think that if some commitments aren't made,
the likelihood of progress is lessened. Since the choice
of language in this context is mostly a matter of choice
of notational conventions Given the range of notational
variation displayed in the literature, I don't even see
it as one of the more important choices to be made.
RS: To sum up, Logic 'is' the language. KIF is a notation,
co-equal to many others. KIF is adequate, well understood
and common. It's no mistake to choose it for SUO.
SUO WG Members,
We have discussed these issues before, and I get the feeling that
last time around everybody went out by the same door they came in.
Let's see if there's anything new that we have learned since then.
Just a few weeks ago in this forum we heard many indignant protestations
as to the neutral character of ontology -- all claiming that there was
no charge of any untoward polarity running through the hull of the
ontological enterprise.
But since that time a larger share of players have unsheathed the cards
that they were keeping up their sleeves, and if any extra evidence were
needed that the factors of character, commerce, and culture play a hand
in the formation of ontologies, whether immanent biases or expressed in
explicit documents, then a due attention to the very conduct of our own
proceedings ought to be more than enough to tip the balance of anyone's
vacillation on the subject. In sum, "the ontological is the political",
that is to say, a little less gnomically, that ontology is the preserve
of the very same sorts of human interests, of personal preferences, and
of popular prejudice, that coordinate the acts and constitute the being
of all that we do.
Randall,
Your remarks are typical of a whole school of thought,
one from which I myself am long ago graduated, but to
continue in its doctrines would be to prove the truth
of what I have observed in my own brief lives: Among
the more deleterious side-effects of thinking in only
one language is a constant tendency to confuse that
language with reality.
The way that one escapes this trap, or at least makes a little bit
of progress toward the exit, is not by giving up any one language,
or by giving up on language altogether -- been there, tried that --
but by looking at the world from as many different stations and
as many different frames of reference as one can find, or make,
among the languages that afford these perspectives and these
points of view. And then, only then, can we even begin to
sift out what's invariant from what's evanescent.
Jon Awbrey
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