Re: SUO: ELP's summary of MRW's standards experience

["John F. Sowa" <sowa@bestweb.net>]

Pierre,

If you want something to critize, go read my paper on
"Signs, Processes, and Language Games", which goes into much
more detail about the philosophical issues than is possible
in a short note:

   http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/signproc.htm

I also recommend my paper on Laws, Facts, and Contexts,
which gets into more details about the formalism:

   http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/laws.htm

PG> This is a bad habit. Predicates, concepts, types, and
> universals are all of very different kinds of thing.
> They are related and there are correspondances but it is
> lazyness or doctrine (to use a rather neutral term) which
> leads to identification.

Glib comments like that are also very lazy.  My positions are
stated in detail in my books and on my web site in articles
that I have cited many times.  Go and look.  For starters,
see the papers cited above.

For the record, following is my position:

 1. I am not identifying universals and particulars with
    anything else.  They have already been identified with too
    many radically different notions to be useful in a serious
    discussion of ontological issues.  (That is one of my 
    criticisms of DOLCE, which uses a novel notion to which
    they are confusingly applying a traditional word.)
  
 2. Predicates are important because they are the basic building
    blocks of the logic that is being used to represent the
    ontology.  Therefore, it is essential to talk about them
    when discussing the ontology.  The differences between the
    many different theories of universals can be avoided by
    casting many (but not all) discussions in terms of 
    predicates.  I also avoid the word "property" for the same
    reason -- any discussion about properties can be cast in
    terms of monadic predicates.

  3. I use the terms "concept" and "relation" as purely formal
     terms:  they are nodes in a conceptul graph.  I agree that
     is not the traditional usage, and I make no pretense that
     it is.  But it allows me to use the terms very precisely
     to characterize the mapping from formalism to reality.

Please read the papers cited above.  Then we can talk.

John