SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema
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LIS. Discussion Note 83
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JA = Jon Awbrey
MW = Matthew West
Matthew,
Continuing from this point:
JA: One of these problems can be called the "explanatory" problem:
If it's really as bad as all that, just how do people manage to
communicate at all, which they just as evidentally do sometimes,
to some degree and extent, though of course, far from perfectly?
And, of course, part of the task of intercommunication, between
people, directly, or between their robotic proxies, indirectly,
is to address the current levels of adequacy in this capacity.
MW: My own view is that in the end meaning is grounded in
ostension (pointing at things) to ground what a person
means for some base things. In an ontology we can only
point with words in a definition.
JA: This is a popular view of end meanings, and it is, of course,
everybody's first theory of practical semiotics, but it only
goes so far in the sort of setting that currently engages us.
JA: How does your ostensible definition of the term "abstract_object"
point me to any things that provide me with enough information to
know what you mean by it, in particular, how it applies to things
that may be thought by some people to be pointed out by a host of
words like "ego", "number", "quark", "starship", "unicorn", etc.?
JA: A sufficient answer must provide interpreters who are not privy
to your personal intuitions or party to your regional sapience
enough information that they might conceivably practically be
able to carry out the task of classifying "all" <things> in
or out of the category <abstract_object>.
JA: Now maybe this sounds like a lot, but we may be encouraged by
the widely accepted belief that there are indeed many examples
of good conceptual definitions and good operational definitions
currently extant and generally valued as useful in real practice.
So that should give us some hope that the task is not impossible,
at least, in principle, whatever the facts may turn out to be in
this or that particular case.
MW: Nothing quite like looking at the definition. And when I do
I see that it is a bit lacking if you only look at the text.
However, if you look at the EXPRESS you find that it is an
ABSTRACT entity type (not my choice of use of the term here --
this is part of the EXPRESS language) and what that means is
that this entity type has no instances except those that are
instances of its subtypes, which is another way of saying it
is exactly the union of its subtypes.
MW: There are three subtypes, class -- which is defined as being
non-well-founded sets, relationship, for which effectively
read binary tuple, and multidimensional_object, for which
effectively read n-ary tuple. Is that operational enough?
Matthew,
I have spent a solid month now focussed on the document that you
submitted as a starter proposal, and I will have to limit myself
to the given text until this voting period is over. This is not
some kind of attack, and there is no reason to get all defensive.
I have already voted yes on both your motions, and I thought from
the beginning that it should have been a perfunctory walk-through
to accept the LIS material as one of many sources of raw ore to
refine in the ontological blast furnaces of the SUO work site.
I think that we could use ten or twenty such starting ingots
in order to converge on a SUO from many sundry perspectives.
But a start is not a finish. What I'm doing here is simply
the same kind of critical conceptual analysis that I have
always had to carry out on any other project that I have
ever worked for or consulted on. If it seems a little
relentless at times, that is simply what it takes to
do the job. I do appreciate the fact that you are
willing to stay in the process and be a test case
for the potential of true engagement. As I have
said before, many of these same tough questions
could be asked of all the other candidates that
invoke similar conceptions at the top of their
ontological heaps, and I guess it's a dirty
job to stand up and answer for the silent
majority, but somebody's got to do it.
But maybe it would be good now to shift away from direct critique
and to look at some positive models of formal systems, that is,
detailed sets of axioms, definitions, and specifications that
carry a significant information workload and that make a real
difference in the power we have to accomplish meaningful goals.
The trick of mind that I learned in programming practice was
to ask myself whether the level of specification that I was
giving to define a function, procedure, process, or task
would be sufficient to "teach" a computer how to do it.
It strikes me that our PAR imposes a similar burden on
us with regard to explaining what on earth we mean by
all these words that we toss so glibly back and forth.
So the first model of success in formalizing that I think
we ought to contemplate, for the sake of abstracting what
elixirs of formative virtue we can from it, is the model
of defining concepts by means of computational programs.
Tomorrow ...
Jon Awbrey
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