Re: An intuition pump

On Sunday, September 21, 2003, at 05:45  PM, pat hayes wrote:
[snip]
>> Now Molly comes along and notes the extreme chauvinism of Sally's 
>> definition, excluding as it does (arguably) eunuchs, hermaphrodites, 
>> intelligent programs, chimps, augmented chimps, Martians and the 
>> like. Molly proposes an alternative ontology for sally:Person.
>>
>> Now, if I understand the view as raised by tim in his issuing, Molly 
>> and the Foafsters are pretty much stuck. sally:Person just *means* 
>> whatever Sally wants it to mean.
>
> Well, it does mean that, but they are not stuck. Molly can introduce 
> molly:person, a superClass of sally:person, tell people what it means, 
> and then folk can use that. If enough people feel that this is the 
> best definition, it will presumably get used more widely and will 
> become the de facto new standard, maybe. More likely, two rival 
> communities will emerge, the Mollyites and the Sallieties, with rather 
> different views about what constitutes a person.

There are at least two ways to express this rivalry: We have two 
*terms* (molly:Person, and sally:Person) each with their own, rival, 
definition, or we have two *definitions* for a single term which has an 
associated concept which the definitions attempt to capture. Your (and, 
I take it, Tim's) view is that we have multiple terms, presumably at 
least one per definition. One thing I'm trying to get at is that people 
might reasonably take Sally's term as *naming* a concept, a concept 
which she then says false things about, strictly analogous with Sally 
coining a URI for *me* and then saying that I was born in 1887. Must 
people coin their own URI for me, in order to say true things about me 
that are contrary to Sally's false statements? I hope we all agree not. 
  So, what justifies the disanalogy?

> What did you expect, that the entire world was going to agree about 
> what words mean?? (Try 'marriage'.)

In your view everyone DOES agree about what words/URIs mean. I'm 
suggesting that people might disagree about what *sally:Person* means.

> The ontological reasoners have at least a chance of not getting 
> confused, because they have names for both concepts and an idea of the 
> relationship between them.

I suspect that there will be some not so easily solved cases. Perhaps 
my example was oversimple.

>  I don't see this as being a problematical kind of example; on the 
> contrary, in fact: it shows (in a simplified caricature)

Ah yes :) Deliberately so, for the record :)

>  how a nuanced vocabulary can arise from people being obliged by the 
> conventions of ownership to define relationships between concept 
> meanings.

How do I express that Sally *tried* to capture the concept that 
planetOfTheApes:Person (only superchimps have rights) captures? (I 
guess the common factor may come into play.)

>  Contrast this with the case where nobody can really say what a URI is 
> supposed to mean,

We have a way of saying what a URI actually means in a graph/document. 
What's at issue is what *else* we have to put in. For all its issues, 
owl:imports vs. uri use gives you a way of specifying the "extended" 
meaning of a URI on a fairly finegrained basis.

>  and when Molly used sally:person in a nonstandard way, that (mis?)use 
> just kind of back-taints all the other uses, so that even Sally's 
> ontology doesn't mean what she intended it to mean any more.

I fail to see it. Explain?

> Now, *that* really is a recipe for world-wide confusion.

I feel some fatuous statement coming one...must resist...can't: 
"World-wide confusion is fine; local confusion isn't"

>> More interestingly, suppose Sally had just been a bit careless and 
>> really was aiming at a more expansive notion of Person, just blew it. 
>> However, before Molly detected the problem, Sally sold her now very 
>> popular domain to People for a Very Narrow Sense of People in Foaf 
>> Documents (PVNSPFD). They refuse to change sally:Person.
>>
>> Now, what concept does sally:Person identify? When? Does it matter?
>
> I would say : whatever PVNSPFD claims it does: because they own the 
> URI (now). However, I doubt if they would have any motivation, having 
> paid for the damn thing, to alter its meaning

Of course not. They *like* the "mis"definition poor Sally gave for it. 
They are trying to hijack her intentions (with, admittedly, what she 
actually said).

They also seem free to change Sally's term any which way. Er...meaning 
stabiltiy? World wide confusion? What if they perversely *do* change 
it, can sally still publish/use her old ontology?

>  (or at least, not without widely disseminating this intended change) 
> since to do so would only confuse their user base. So, it would likely 
> retain its meaning. Yes, it does matter.
>
>> Is there anything Wrong with Molly (or *Sally*) putting out an 
>> alternative ontology, and the Foaf x.x ontology switch its 
>> owl:imports statement to point to the alt-ontology instead of the 
>> (now owned by) PVNSPFD one.
>
> Ah, that indeed raises a nasty issue about 'versions' of ontologies 
> and the real meaning of importing. But that issue just IS nasty: it is 
> almost as nasty when phrased purely syntactically as when it is 
> phrased semantically.  So think that is a red herring.

Er.. I'm not yet seeing the sequitur. Lots of things are nasty both 
syntactically and semantically. How does it make it a red herring? Real 
meaning of importing? I thought importing was quite clear. Could you 
separate out the issues a bit?

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.

Received on Monday, 22 September 2003 03:55:14 UTC