SUO: *Date 14 Feb 2002
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SUO WG Members,
Let me try to bring some thoughts together about one
of the more persistent phenomena that I've observed
in this group, and one that I think will doom our
efforts to if we don't address it smartly enough.
An example from real life:
| The Chair of a Mathematics Department
| sends a memo to the Faculty that says:
|
| The Curriculum Committee will meet in Room 432 at 1 today
| to evaluate the new teaching modules for teaching modules.
Most of the recipients will take read this in passing
as it crosses their desks without so much as blinking
an eye, and only a few will give it more than a smile.
Happens all the time.
Things that happen all the time are called "persistent phenomena",
and they are the sorts of things that a person just has to learn
how to deal with.
As it happens, though, we seem to be operating under the
influence of a persistent assumption that this sort of
phenomenon can be eliminated from our daily lives.
Something has obviously got to give.
For my part, I blame Aristotle:
| Words spoken are symbols or signs (symbola) of affections or
| impressions (pathemata) of the soul (psyche); written words
| are the signs of words spoken. As writing, so also is speech
| not the same for all races of men. But the mental affections
| themselves, of which these words are primarily signs (semeia),
| are the same for the whole of mankind, as are also the objects
| (pragmata) of which those affections are representations or
| likenesses, images, copies (homoiomata).
|
| Aristotle, 'On Interpretation', 1.16a.4-7, H.P Cooke (trans.),
|'Aristotle, Volume 1', trans. by H.P. Cooke and H. Tredennick,
| Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.
|
| http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03284.html
| http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03316.html
| http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03317.html
| http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03324.html
This idea, that there just has to be some sort of a "common sense",
that is to say, a "canonical concept" or a "mutual mental meaning"
for everything under heaven, and that all we have to do is resort
to that in order to resolve all of our "failures to communicate",
that is an idea I normally describe as "Aristotle's approximation
to the sign relation". My considered judgement tells me that it
is an idea whose time has come, at which time it was most likely
a needful thing to assume, if only to be avoid being overwhelmed
by the real complexity of sign relations, and whose time may even,
one day, far in the future, come again, but an idea whose time is
gone, for now, and maybe for good.
One of the things that will really doom this project is if we think
that the only way to achieve inter-communication and inter-operation
is to try and re-institute this very fond notion in our new web warps.
But that's enough for today.
Happy Valentine's Day!
Jon Awbrey
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