RE: Fwd: HCLS IG Note on mapping and publishing life sciences RDF

hi david and scott,

from my understanding, the common usage is a bit more confusing.  good old
wikipedia has:

" The terms a priori ("from the earlier") and a posteriori ("from the
later") are used in philosophy (epistemology) to distinguish two types of
knowledge, justifications or arguments. A priori knowledge or justification
is independent of experience (for example "All bachelors are unmarried"); a
posteriori knowledge or justification is dependent on experience or
empirical evidence (for example "Some bachelors are very happy"). A
posteriori justification makes reference to experience; but the issue
concerns how one knows the proposition or claim in question—what justifies
or grounds one's belief in it. Galen Strawson wrote that an a priori
argument is one in which "you can see that it is true just lying on your
couch. You don't have to get up off your couch and go outside and examine
the way things are in the physical world. You don't have to do any
science."[1] There are many points of view on these two types of assertions,
and their relationship is one of the oldest problems in modern philosophy. "
[1] and goes on to describe how confused and certain every one is about the
notions.

cheers,
michael

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori

Michael Miller
Software Engineer
Institute for Systems Biology

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Booth [mailto:david@dbooth.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 2:17 PM
> To: M. Scott Marshall
> Cc: HCLS; biohackathon@googlegroups.com;
> linkedlifedatapracticesnote@googlegroups.com; public-lod@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Fwd: HCLS IG Note on mapping and publishing life sciences RDF
>
> On Tue, 2012-03-13 at 21:16 +0100, M. Scott Marshall wrote:
> [ . . . ]
> > IG Note (Draft) HCLS IG Note on mapping and publishing life sciences RDF
> > [1]
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XzdsjCfPylcyOoNtDfAgz15HwRdCD-
> 0e0ixh21_U0y0/edit?hl=en_US
>
> Nice work on this!  A couple of small editorial suggestions:
>
> 1. AFAICT the phrases "a posteriori" and "a priori" are being misused to
> mean "afterward" and "beforehand".  These terms actually mean:
>
> http://www.onelook.com/?w=a+posteriori&ls=a
> a posteriori: "involving reasoning from facts or particulars to general
> principals or from effects to causes ("A posteriori demonstration")'
>
> http://www.onelook.com/?w=a+priori&ls=a
> a priori: 'involving deductive reasoning from a general principle to a
> necessary effect; not supported by fact ("An a priori judgment")'
>
>
> 2. The intro mentions that "a query for Homo sapiens gene label "Alg2"
> in Entrez Gene (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene) returns multiple
> results. Among them is one gene located in chromosome 5 (Entrez
> ID:85365) and the other in chromosome 9 (Entrez ID:313231), each with
> multiple aliases".  But the results that I see show ID:85365 as the ID
> for the one on chromosome 9, and the other one (maybe?) has ID 10016:
> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene?term=Alg2[sym]%20homo%20sapiens
>
>
> Thanks!
>
>
> --
> David Booth, Ph.D.
> http://dbooth.org/
>
> Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
> reflect those of his employer.
>

Received on Tuesday, 13 March 2012 21:58:23 UTC