SUO: 04 Jun 2002 -- Curiouser & Curiouser
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BA = Bill Andersen
JA = Jon Awbrey
JA: Having made the hopelessly naive mistake of actually trying to read
the SUMO documents again, I tried to get some clarification as to
how SUMO set theory compared with its claimed ancestor or indeed
any standard set theory. The SUMO representatives, along with
an assortment of strange bedfellows, ignored the question,
then changed the subject, then suggested that the new
subject be marginalized to the Ontology Sublist.
If it were the first time I had seen this
strategy, I would probably be shocked.
As it is, I am only surprised at the
conspiracy of interests that arose
on all sides to avoid the issue.
I am working on a hypothesis.
BA: No hypothesis needed, Jon. I remember I'm one
of those who you named as a "strange bedfellow"
along with John Sowa.
BA: I will say again what I said then. In a practical exercise,
as SUO is supposed to be, an ontology of mathematics deserves
the same priority as an ontology of mind, beliefs, or thirdnesses --
that is LOW. There is a lot of work to do without worrying about
these things. Surely, set theory plays a role in the background
of the logic if you like FOL, as category theory does if you like
what IFF is trying to do. The key term is BACKGROUND -- none of
this ought to be the subject matter focus of the SUO at this point
in time.
BA: If you want sets in SUO, then either accept the set theory that SUMO offers,
create one of your own (you'll have to give axioms), or do what John Sowa
recommends and provide and/or contribute to a framework in which your
favorite set theory has a happy home -- maybe this is IFF.
BA: Please stop clogging this list up with your rantings
and conspiracy theories that neither I nor most of
the participants care the least about.
Bill,
In the ontology of conspiracies, a conspiracy of interests
is commonly set apart from your deliberate conspiracies by
the circumstance that no conscious choice need be involved.
It could be that a bunch of people are just equally given
to talking about things that they know nothing about, and
equally indolent about doing the hard work that its would
take to develop a non-trivial formal system in any area,
or even the minor work of reading a few standard texts.
For two years I have tried to prevent some of you folks
from making complete fools of yourselves outside of the
charmed circle you currently inhabit, because I know how
things are in some of the circles where the people quietly
go about the business of creating the knowledge that you so
glibly take for grounded, where they know that knowledge is
not "engineered" by writing down axioms -- that is the last
stage of the process, more like "knowledge arranging", but
even then you would have to know a little bit about the
inquiry process that really hones the knowledge home,
and what goes together in a consistent arrangement
and what does not. But that would be hard.
And there are thorns, even to that job.
In the real world, where people are in the business of coming up with
effective descriptions of reality like all our lives depended on it,
where they do not have the luxury of "classifying away" anything
that it does not suit them to think about -- abstract forms to
left, physical stuff to the right, and never the twain shall
meet -- where folks have been forced to accept the idea of
making mathematical models of physical realties simply
because those are the kind that work, well, getting
the math right is a practical necessity and thus
a HI priority. But you don't worry about that.
And nobody here cares the least about that.
So go ahead and call yourself an "Ontological Knowledge Engineer",
print up those business cards, attach the prefixes "ontology of this"
or "mereo-that" to every subject in sight as a way of wiping it clean
of all the work that has gone before and claiming it for your own to
start over from scratch -- what does it it matter if mereo-topology
looks like a cartoon version of the state of topology 250 yrs ago?
Just don't go saying that stuff in front of people who really
engineer the knowledge, the hard way, if you are not prepared
for a lot of laughing, and not up their sleeves.
And this is thanks I get for trying to save you that embarrassent.
Jon Awbrey
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