Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Generative Methodology Glass Bead Games
On the limits of the OWL standard à [184]
Reading material [1]
Reading material [2]
Reading material [3]
Summary of the discussion up to this point à [186]
Dialogue about natural ontology and mapping to Information Models
Dick,
I feel that you should concentrate on what your Mark systems actually do.
A few comments about the following excerpt from your PDF file:
“This week, we seek first to give each "idea" one clear and unambiguous identifier. Next, we build a "science" for assigning each just one meaning -- anchoring that “meaning” in a testable web of axiomatic theory and "natural laws".”
Any idea that can be so narrowly circumscribed is going to be a very tiny datum that might be useful when it is needed. But any truly significant idea is going to grow and evolve -- even in mathematics and physics. Just look at the way the "idea" of number has grown over the centuries from the positive integers to the nonnegative integers, the full range of integers, rational numbers, irrational numbers, algebraic numbers, transcendental numbers, imaginary numbers, complex numbers, quaternions, etc.
Or look at the transformation of the ideas of energy, momentum, and mass during the 20th century in the theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, etc.
Your prescription is a death sentence for future growth in meaning -- i.e., creativity -- in science, engineering, business, the arts, and everyday life.
Following is a slightly edited excerpt from a note I sent on a related topic to someone who has a different vision, but one that is also too rigid to be effective. I believe it applies to yours as well.
John
<edited excerpt>
My preferred motto for any such endeavor is a statement I have often quoted from Whitehead's _Modes of Thought_:
We must be systematic, but we must keep our systems open.
And by open, that means open to major revision at every level from the top to the bottom. That follows from another of my favorite quotations from Whitehead:
“ Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.”
I believe that the most obstructive nuisance we face today is the lingering stench of 20th-century logical positivism, which evolved into the analytic philosophy that still dominates most of the work on formal ontology and knowledge-based systems.
Whitehead had an appropriate attitude toward the past. He made the point that all of western philosophy has been a series of footnotes to Plato and Aristotle. But he was never afraid of making a total upheaval in the foundations.
Look at his major book on ontology, _Process and Reality_, which is firmly grounded in the highest respect for the wisdom of Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, and their followers up to the 20th century. Yet he recognized the necessity of uprooting the entire ontological foundations in order to accommodate 20th-century science.
I am convinced that Whitehead's approach, in broad outline if not in every detail, is the best ontological achievement of the 20th century. But I also believe -- and I think Whitehead would agree -- that it is unlikely to survive the upheavals to come in the 21st century.
I must confess that I am partly to blame for the current popularity of the word "ontology", since my 1983 book was one of the first to introduce that term into AI. However, I now believe that the only people who are doing serious research in ontology today are the natural scientists.
Every idea in every branch of science is open to the possibility of drastic revision with every new discovery.
The work of every branch of cognitive science (which includes philosophy, linguistics, logic, psychology, AI, and their applications to knowledge-based systems) is essentially a subset of semiotics -- the study of signs from every source: phenomenology (of all species, not just humans), linguistics (of all possible languages), and reasoning (induction, deduction, abduction, analogy, probability, and any other variations may that be discovered).
If you shift your focus to semiotics -- in the broad sense I just outlined -- I believe you could make a valuable contribution.
But if you continue the fantasy of building an unchangeable foundation for all knowledge, I am afraid that you will end up with one more obstructive nuisance.