SUO: Re: Logic, Topic Maps, & ReDeFo Logic, Or Not

[Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@att.net>]

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John,

My original point, if I can reconstruct it, to do with the reification
of relational roles, things like <husband, wife>, <mother, daughter>,
<friend, friend>, <subject, predicate>, and so on, in the form of
essential (= non-accidental, non-relative) attributes.

Since I was assuming that you still remembered the oldspeak, I used the
word "reification" the way that it was formerly used, not to mean just
about any representation of anything in symbols, as lately ab-used,
but as a cautionary term, to keep us wary of projecting on nature
the categories that may exist solely in our minds, even as we go
ahead and use these categories, but keep in mind that they may
be accidental, contingent, conventional, ephemeral, relative,
symbolic, and even mistaken, in a word, "interpretive".

In that respect, notations that lead
us into oblivion are not our friends.

Jon Awbrey

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John F. Sowa wrote:
> 
> Jon,
> 
> In some contexts they are, and in some contexts they aren't:
> 
>  > But they ain't interchangeable bits.
> 
> In French, the word "femme" means woman
> or wife.  In Russian, the word for woman
> is "zhenshchina", which by etymology would
> mean a person with the status of a wife.
> 
> The relational structures associated with the
> concept types Husband and Wife are more complex
> than the relational structures associated with
> the types Man and Woman.   Sometimes it is
> important to note that point, and sometimes
> it isn't.  And in some cultures, the point
> is so obvious that they don't bother to use
> different words -- even more significantly,
> they use the role to define the "essence".
> 
> That turns the idea of "essence" upside down.
> But it doesn't bother the Russians, and it
> doesn't bother me.  I don't believe in
> context-independent essences.
> 
> For Dolce, Nicola claims that essences
> are essential to ontology.  I think that
> they're important for classifying concepts
> and other signs, but the notion is too
> complex to be assumed as fundamental.
> 
> John

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