Key questions on Common Upper Ontology
4/20/2004 10:17
AM
Hello Paul,
Interesting discussion on ontology.
Having some experience in this area, particularly with formal ontology, I feel I am able to contribute.
I do agree with Mike's assessment except the passage below, I am commenting because I think the distinction is an important one; particularly if, as Mike stated, an "upper-level ontology" is to focus thinking and provide perspective.
Since the introduction of pragmatics is so essential to the
effectiveness of a specific ontology, there will never be just one upper-level
ontology.
Imagine a time when pragmatics does not exist for you. Before gesture itself. What do you need before you can know that a gesture is intended as a reference? Before you can draw the relation of meaning between gesture and reference?
I believe the existence of pragmatics presumes there is something to talk or sign about. Pragmatics does not make the ontology effective-- pragmatics may help make a special ontic model better understood by engineers, but only the state of internal and external coherence can make an ontology effective or not. This is the problem. An easily modeled domain with little change can have all it parts and relations -- subsumption, inherited characteristics, etc. -- well-understood and defined.
Outside such limited boundaries the model breaks -- and this is not because of pragmatics.
Really, I think, Mike has it partially right. There is a barrier to the adoption of an "upper-level ontology" or formal ontology, probably more than one.
The main cause though is not pragmatics, it is politics, in particular because politics deals with administrative control and governing. This is what ontology does -- it governs the field of possible relations. No one, it seems, wants to risk limiting his or her choices.
I think the right "upper-level ontology" cannot be easily selected without significant social discourse and debate both of which will serve to enrich the public understanding. After all, data processors and capitalists have dumbed us down. Our idea of government as a seat of guidance is corrupted by most modern examples.
-Ken