Re: complementOf -> viewOf: proposed text

Hmmm... this is starting to feel to me like a philosophical rathole.

I think we may be muddling things and roles, as maybe illustrated by your:

   So similarly I would not like to conclude alternateOf(Bush, Obama)

This feels like a replay of the old Fregian "Hesperus and Phosporus" sense and 
reference discussion.

All this complexity is leading me to a view that while transitivity of 
alternativeOf may be appealing at some levels of intuition, it may carry too 
many traps and, absent a compelling requirement, we'd be better to leave it.

Which I think is what Paolo is suggesting.

#g
--

On 18/01/2012 08:55, Stian Soiland-Reyes wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 18:01, Graham Klyne<GK@ninebynine.org>  wrote:
>>> alternateOf(paoloInCafe, customerOnRedChair)
>>> alternateOf(stianInCafe, customerOnRedChair)
>> Hmmm... I'm not sure these actually match my intuition about alternateOf;
>> i.e. that they're both versions of some real-world thing.  What real-worlkd
>> thing would that be?
>
> It would be something like the atoms of the living person who sits
> within the confines of the red chair. Perhaps it is more a case of
> specialization than alternateOf in this case.  (and so a strong case
> for why specializationOf is not a subproperty of alternateOf)
>
> But this thing with the atoms is not true. A customer is not a set of
> atoms. A cafe *customer* is a concept which depends on the
> interactions with the cafe. While Paolo was in the cafe, he sat in the
> red chair and ordered coffee - and so for a period (the full lifetime
> of paoloInCafe) he also became customerOnRedChair.
>
>
> This would probably be fine then:
>
> specializationOf(paoloInCafe, customerOnRedChair)
> specializationOf(paoloInCafe, paolo)
>
> -->
> alternateOf(paolo, customerOnRedChair)
>
> which makes sense - they are both talking about the same thing.
>
>
>
> but if we also have the equivalent assertions about Stian - but the
> old characterisation interval of paoloInCafe never overlaps that of
> stianInCafe - then I feel they should *not* be alternateOf each other,
> because they did not exist at the same time.
>
> So similarly I would not like to conclude alternateOf(Bush, Obama)
>
> .. because if we do, then as far as I can tell there is not much value
> in alternateOf() any more.
>
>
>
> And that is perhaps my point. We can't have a single hierarchical
> structure organizing everything that exists (and talk about "the same
> real world thing"), because we include in "exists" various abstract
> concepts and simplifications that are not easily mappable to our
> understanding of the physical world.
>
> I am sure we can agree that this email message can be characterised by
> an entity. However you can't easily map that entity to electrons on
> the wire or photons coming out of the screen - although we are of
> course aware that the message would not exists without those.
>
>

Received on Thursday, 19 January 2012 09:48:24 UTC