SUO: Re: ontology as science
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John F. Sowa wrote:
>
> Jon,
>
> That was the original motivation for Cyc back in 1984:
>
JA: A research support ontology, at a non-negotiable minimum,
> > would start from a stock of "basic undergrad knowledge"
> > and go from there. So far, it been like having teeth
> > pulled (by an amateur dentist) trying to get across
> > even the most basic standard textbook definitions
> > of concepts that nobody would argue with for
> > a second in any of the research communities
> > that I have ever worked with.
>
> But in 1991, they added microtheories because there were
> too many inconsistencies in the knowledge that was required
> to support applications. Today, they have 6000 and growing.
>
> I agree that the basic undergrad knowledge is important, but it is
> impossible to use it without being able to accommodate contextual
> differences, disagreements about how to apply it, and so forth
> into the knowledge soup.
John,
I have been at this a while, too. I started working on building a theorem prover
in 1980 because of a few problems at the lambda point between graph theory, logic,
and number theory that I was obsessed with at the time, and after hitting the road
to see what was being done at 3 or 4 other sites, had pretty much come by 1986 to my
own conclusions by about the way forward. I have seen a few changes, but the basic
approaches are still just as fundamentally flawed, in my view, as they ever were.
In my current capstone-dissertation-exercise I am trying to integrate all of
those tattered threads into some kind of tapestry -- you know the tune --
that I can leave as a legacy, you know, in the good sense of the word.
There's a major chunk of my dissertation draft devoted to the "arrow of formalization"
that takes us from our casual, formative, and informal descriptions of phenomena to
our fully-fledged and formalized object theories. There's a related chunk that
sets up a whole apparatus of "frameworks, genres, and motifs" for dealing with
discourse analysis in a context-sensitive, polymorphous, relativistic way.
So I think that I get all this stuff about multi-cultural diversity.
But there's nothing about all of this post*modern perspective that says
we can afford to throw out the Archimedes and just keep the bathwater.
I have searched in some desperation through both
the OpenCyc and the SUMO palimpsests for any hint
of anything that could be called the first elements
of my favorite subjects -- I would love to find some
help with some of those old problems that I'm hoping
to get back to, with luck this side of Plato's heaven --
but I am just not finding any place to stand up there.
Jon Awbrey
Incidental Musement:
http://www.thewalters.org/archimedes/
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