Re: Whole and Parts (and boundaries)
Kirt,
Thanks for the comments. Those are very good examples about
the way people think, talk, and act about practical matters
concerning boundaries and borders.
These are just a few of the many, many reasons why formal
ontologies that ignore purpose become irrelevant. They
generate large collections of axioms that have no application
to anything that people need or want.
I'm completely in favor of using logic, but it's important to
develop axiomatizations that have some relevance to actual
applications. Otherwise, people will just dismiss logic as
useless formalism.
John Sowa
__________________________________________________________________
Murray Altheim wrote:
>
> For example, when lay people (as opposed to geographers
> or politicians) talk about the boundary between two
> countries, they generally don't think about the thickness
> of the boundary. Most people would think that there is
> a political boundary between the US and Canada, or between
> any two US states, and that walking one would cross that
> boundary but at no time be standing *on* it. Zero width.
Having been raised partly in Europe (and I expect that Europeans here
will also take
some exception with this assertion) there were clearly instances where
the border
has some fuzzy boundary that interpenetrates according to the circumstance.
The clearest examples of this are back in the Cold War where people were
shot trying
to escape from the DDR. Fro their perspective and from the perspective of
DDR security forces there was a border of a good 100 meters or so width.
By
international law this was of course on the DDR side. But in the minds
of people
this border had real width.
In the days before the Schengen Accords there was also sometimes a
"width" to the
German-Dutch border - once a German/Dutch team of police actually took
my passport
crossing the border and walked away (this was on a train). Tense
moments there. Of course
most of the time in this experience I was in Holland and of course the
border had no
real width.
However this makes no difference to people involved in these things. On
trains from Munich to Salzburg
for example there used to be a border control about 20 minutes before
Salzburg. The trains was
stopped, etc. I'm not actually certain where this occurred (somewhere
in Austria of course) but being
on a stopped train doing border control is a slightly jarring experience.
No need to speak of the continuation of such behavior *after* the
liberation of Poland but while the
DDR was still technically a separate country (my ex and myself got off a
train in the middle of the
night at the former military stop just before Frankfurt an der Oder,
took a taxi to the bridge and
walked across the Vistula - a whole series of naive concepts of borders
with widths - and these
would have been actionable back in the Cold War from the perspective of
security people and I
have to tell you that it loomed large in my mind even then [Jan 1992]).
And borders on rivers are entirely different matters even in state,
national, or international
politics, esp. when issues arise re: police forces, fire, rescue or
responsibility for environmental
factors. Generally these are hammered out in courts or special
agreements. There is still
technically a disagreement between Virginia and Maryland (USA) regarding
the Potomac
River border (including the border's exact boundary and definition).
Kirt Undercoffer