SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema
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LIS. Discussion Note 60
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[Reposting after 1 hour]
JA = Jon Awbrey
MW = Matthew West
Matthew,
Collecting my wits a bit for the discussion ahead --
JA: It is common to recognize distinctions among a number of things:
1. The word "sweetness", the noun form of the adjective "sweet".
2. The concept "sweetness", something like a noun in the mind.
3. The property sweetness, also known by the term "intension".
4. The set of sweet things, which constitutes the "extension"
of either the term "sweetness" or the concept "sweetness",
according to one's taste.
JA: It's true that some people, on the advice of their meta-physicians,
are always trying to cut down on the multiplicity of sweetnesses
that they admit to their ontological diets, and so may attempt
to eliminate some of these food-for-thought-groups altogether.
But let's suppose that we are liberal ontologists, putting
away Dr. Ockham's guillotine for a little while, or that
there is otherwise sufficient elbow room in our brains
to permit us to luxuriate in one of two redundancies.
JA: In that case, I think that it would be a good idea
to include all four of these types of entities in
our plans for world nomination, if for no better
reason than that it makes it so much easier to
understand what in the world most people are
talking about most of the time, and that'd
be a major vitamin for intercommunication.
MW: Perhaps within the SUO as a whole, but not necessarily
within a pure 4D ontology, which is intended to be a
specific and restricted way of looking at the world.
JA: You have proposed incorporating the LIS datamodel into the
category-theoretic framework of IFF. In order to do this
it will be necessary to begin thinking about structure in
terms of the mappings or the transformations that preserve
that structure, whether wholly, as with isomorphisms, or
partially, as with homomorphisms or arrows, that relate
the objects in a category to each other. But there is
a big difference between relating one thing to another
and reducing one thing to another, or eliminating one
thing in favor of another. Until one has proven that
a reduction can be carried through, it is generally
better, heuristically and strategically speaking,
to give the benefit of the doubt to the sorts of
things that people have found useful in practice,
and to keep something more than what some folks,
who do not practice the practice in question,
opine is the "minimal adequate toolbox" (MAT).
MW: When we look at the SUO as a whole I quite agree.
However, the limited perspective we have in LIS
is also a perspective that should be preserved.
I agree, at least for the foreseeable time being, and to the extent that
I presently understand your perspective, about which my information is
still very partial, though that is a factor that may change with time
and due diligence on both our parts. Agreement on that score, however,
is not the end of discussion -- it is only the beginning of a different
phase of discussion, a phase that involves deeper analysis and broader
synthesis at one and the same time, or maybe more like alternating times.
Part of my personal mission in life is to understand the geometry of this
space whose points are POV's, that is, variant philosophical perspectives.
Lesson One in data modeling, or systems analysis, as we used to call it
in olden times, is to preserve enough dimensions in the data to capture
the dimensions of the phenomenon or the problem in question. Those old
systems analysts, the Greeks, committed this lesson to a pithy aphorism
usually translated by "Save the Phenomenon" or "Save the Appearances",
though I'm told by those who say they know that the Greek exhortation
that is rendered "to save" conveys the further imperative "to solve".
Speaking of gnomic epigrams, those gems of empirical data compression
the wits of which are frequently found so adamant in refracting their
own reconstruction, it was formerly a commonplace in systems analysis
to say that a system is just a "list of variables" (LOV). Now that
may sound, if one strains to read it superficially enough, like the
very modern major motto of nominal thinking, but one must bear in
mind that this particular bit of conventional wisdom takes up its
place in the course of systems thinking where the receiver of it
has already absorbed the impact of Lesson One, and that it has
been transmitted by the variety of systems thinkers who have
already assimilated Lesson One, and who would never dream
that any reader could be so detached from reality as
to give that statement so nominal a reading.
In this context, then, I listed the following four dimensions,
that have been recognized over time, historically speaking,
as providing a frame of reference for describing the
phenomenon or the problem that we have in view:
1. The Term.
For example, "sweetness", the noun form of the adjective "sweet".
2. The Concept.
For example, "sweetness", something like a noun in the mind.
3. The Property.
For example, sweetness, that may also be referred to
as an intension or a quality of the thing in question,
though some will make further distinctions among these.
4. The Set.
For example, the set of sweet things, that comprises
the extension of either the term "sweetness" or the
concept "sweetness", according to one's taste.
And at this point you have said that you see a way
to dispense with 1 of these 4 dimensions, or maybe
to collate 2 of them into 1, leaving 3 as the only
3 dimensions that we need to save the appearances.
Sound familiar?
My question is: How can we be assured that you are
collating dimensions, and not just conflating them?
Jon Awbrey
P.S. If nothing else, I hope that I have dispelled
the myth that Peirceans can't count to four.
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