tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249867.post1135787621834742941..comments2023-06-18T23:28:28.840+10:00Comments on ShelterIt - My digital think-tank: Ontological PonderingsAlexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10613480150660825848noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249867.post-51992345740872287382009-10-30T16:34:15.789+11:002009-10-30T16:34:15.789+11:00Hi Joe; you can follow me here from wherever you w...Hi Joe; you can follow me here from wherever you want. :) Blogging wouldn't be the same without it.<br /><br />I agree completely that every expression isn't only contextual when it was made, but also in every future scenario. I think that also was part of my original discomfort with how ontologies are defined.<br /><br />Object, or the receiving notions when doing inferencing, must always be contextual, but because computers are logical beasts, we try to define things in a way that makes it easier (or at all possible) for them to do their bidding, which is to say, we use logic (prominently first-order logic) as our language. But I suspect the biggest problem with using logic as a construct for human knowledge is its incredible rigidity.<br /><br />How to solve this, I have no idea. But I'm sniffing John Sowa and his work for inspiration of breaking free from the shackles of induction and deduction. :) We'll see where it all leads me.Alexhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10613480150660825848noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249867.post-37032929120726504522009-10-29T06:09:44.278+11:002009-10-29T06:09:44.278+11:00Hey Alex,
I followed you here from NGC4LIB, hope ...Hey Alex,<br /><br />I followed you here from NGC4LIB, hope that's ok.<br /><br />I started reading around and found this post. My philosophy chops aren't the greatest, so bear with me.<br /><br />You mentioned <br /><br />Alex is_a person<br />and<br />Alex has_a son<br /><br />but does the second one really clear it up? "has_a" makes sense as a relationship between a father and a son- a father has a son. But say the father also has a wife, has a car, has a friend, has a funny idea about ontology, has a haircut, has a heart attack when he thinks about a son driving a car with a friend...? Then what? In each of those cases, the father's relationship to the person or thing he "has" is very different.<br /><br />What I'm trying to say is, what if the simplest words in English (has a, is a, etc.) do not boil down to simple concepts but are interdependent and contextual? Does that make this semantic web stuff impossible (or maybe just not worth the effort)?<br /><br />Anyway, thanks for the thoughts.Joe M.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14188682527666213718noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249867.post-60440282014929227542009-10-19T16:36:54.528+11:002009-10-19T16:36:54.528+11:00Hi Adrian. Thanks for your insightful comments. I ...Hi Adrian. Thanks for your insightful comments. I think you raise some interesting points, but I think I need to define better some of my intentions before we move further.<br /><br />First, though, I must confess that buried somewhere deep inside my prose was the notion that logical equivalence isn't the same as semantic equivalence, and that first-order logic in this case fails to do what we want it to do. The epistemological questions for me cannot be satisfied through formal logic. '"was_a" is superfluous' because logically is_a and a date logically can deal with it doesn't denote the cultural or linguistic semantics I'm after. Besides, in order to solve the problem of the context being highly informal I must build another formal model? That path leads to recursion of my original problem. :) I'm not after logical equivalence; I'm after knowledge.<br /><br />I also was trying to say that inference, deduction, induction and affirmation leaves out a whole great deal of what is quite common to basic philosophy, not to mention human cognition; I think that cognitive bias is extremely important to KM, and that truth-based systems fail in this. I've been quite taken with Sowa's take on using analogy as a vehicle for knowledge, but I have to go and tickle my friend Murray Altheim for more on that as he knows so much more than me on these things.<br /><br />As to the wonders of reification, then if you mean that reification is more than a feature and closer to a requisite of any sort of knowledge representation, then I would agree with you. :) I personally hate reification from a standpoint that it is a "something"; it's not a something, like a function or feature, but a fundamental thing we do and must do all the time; it is the platform upon which knowledge representation should happen. The problem of temporality (or lack thereof) in knowledge systems is quite overwhelming, I think.<br /><br />We can always define stuff; that doesn't make it real, and Wittgenstein is right in this. I especially like your noting of the problem of language in formal sciences as mostly unnoticeable, which just emphasize how tricky this part of it all is.<br /><br />As to the notion of a meta-language as a basis for any other language, well, I'm agreeing that we go meta in order to define something that makes sense of the world, but as we climb the cognitive ladder, at what point does language (as a specific thing) fade into the notion of a cognitive function?Alexhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10613480150660825848noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249867.post-38676851323852492042009-10-16T06:27:11.670+11:002009-10-16T06:27:11.670+11:00Hallo Alexander,
your job description sounds exci...Hallo Alexander,<br /><br />your job description sounds exciting. :-) As I understand it, your post gets to the basic problems of the semantic web & ontology-stuff. I don't think I get it all (especially because I haven't gone into the practical stuff very deep yet), but here are my thoughts.<br /><br />While reading your post, I thought the big problem of ontologies is very well illustrated by looking at (& simplyfying) the two hilosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the early Tractatus he reduces meaningful philosophical and scientific language to logics and says: "The world is everything that is the case", i.e. the whole of all facts (which logically is the set of all true statements). If we construct an ontology like that, as a set of true statements we get the problems you are talking about.<br /><br />So, in his later philosophy, Wittgenstein analyzes language use (in ordinary language, mathematics, logics, philosophy etc.) and concludes that all meaning is fuzzy, changing and dependent on the respective "Sprachspiel" it is used in. So language is changing but intertwined with "Lebensformen", with culture. That taken, the change is mostly unnoticeable, only in retrospect by comparing two distant states of language.<br /><br />How do we cope with this problem? Constructing "kind_of" & "can_be" predicates? (My suggestions is at the end of this commentary.)<br /><br />You write:<br />"Alex is_a Person, for sure, but at some point I shall die, and then I change from is_a to a was_a. What implications will this, if any, have on things? Should is_a and was_a be synonyms, antonyms, allegoric of, or projection through?"<br /><br />I think the "was_a" is superfluous, because it is logically equivalent with the two statements "is_a" & "has_died". And I think it is useful and avoids many problems to conceive denotation atemporal, i.e. "is a person" denotes all persons in past present and future whether dead, unborn or living.<br /><br />You say:<br />"Change is the key to all this, and I don't see many systems designed to cope with change."<br /><br />I think the answer to the problem of change and the related problems of ambiguity and contradiction is reification, i.e. the objectification of statements in order to make statements about them. So we can attribute an author and a date of publishing to statements, we can question their truth and challenge them by making contrary statements etc. Or we can construct ontologies inductively, by analyzing frequency, relations and other usage patterns of predicates and classes over time. Because the meaning of a word is product of its relation to other words in a language (which changes over time), ontologies give us an ideal tool for determining the meaning of a predicate, class or resource at a moment and their change over time.<br /><br />Summing my belief up that reification should be a crucial component of every "semantic web":<br /><br />Without meta-language, there is no language at all.<br /><br />AdrianAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com