Re: [ontolog-forum] Event Ontology

"Women are not real, he tells himself, and derives great comfort from the 
thought -- there are no such things.  This doctrine let us call ontological 
misogyny...Source:  http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/church.htm
Indeed, John.
If one says "is" when he thinks it is not, or say "is not" when we think it 
is, he lies.
But if one says "it is" when it is not, or say "it is not" when it is in the 
real world, we only talk of ontological commitments, as antirealism or 
irrealism or nominalism. "My reality is not your reality; we live in 
different worlds; in my world no events exists; for my reality, all 
relations are nonrealities; in my universe all states and qualities are 
fictions; for me only physical objects exist; in my cosmos no reality is 
real...".
Anti-realism to ontological entities, claiming about the non-reality of 
nonobservable and nontangible entities with human senses (currently abstract 
entities), is becoming fashionable intellectual style.
Azamat Abdoullaev

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@bestweb.net>
To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@ontolog.cim3.net>
Cc: <semantic-web@w3.org>
Sent: Friday, September 04, 2009 4:22 PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Event Ontology


> Azamat,
>
> That is an extreme version of nominalism:
>
>> "events are primarily linguistic or cognitive in nature.
> > That is, the world does not really contain events. Rather, events
> > are the way by which agents classify certain useful and relevant
> > patterns of change."
>> http://motools.sourceforge.net/event/event.html
>> I read many event ontologies, but this one is the most idiosyncratic,
> > softly speaking.
>
> Unfortunately, that point of view was fairly widespread among
> 20th century analytic philosophers.  Some of them even claimed
> that all the laws of physics are merely verbal (or mathematical)
> summaries of observations.
>
> That view is true of some so-called laws, such as Bode's law,
> which states a simple numerical formula for the distance of the
> planets from the sun.  Most physicists, however, are realists
> with regard to the laws of physics:  they believe that there is
> something real underlying the laws that have been tested and
> verified under many kinds of conditions by large numbers of
> experimenters.
>
> The option of treating events as real and allowing quantified
> variables to range over events is usually called 'event semantics'
> and attributed to Donald Davidson.  However, Peirce insisted that
> it was appropriate to quantify over events long before Davidson,
> and Whitehead made events the central focus of his ontology.
>
> Furthermore, Davidson had taken Whitehead's course when he
> was an undergraduate at Harvard.  He was so enthusiastic about
> Whitehead's approach that he decided to study for a PhD in
> philosophy at Harvard.
>
> Unfortunately, Davidson was suckered into a "bait and switch"
> deal because Whitehead retired, and Davidson was stuck with
> Quine as his thesis advisor.  Quine was a nominalist who had
> no sympathy with Whitehead's philosophy, so Davidson couldn't
> write his dissertation on event semantics under Quine.
>
> But Davidson did return to event semantics after he got tenure
> and didn't have to "suffer the slings and arrows" of the
> nominalists.  But it would be more appropriate to call event
> semantics the Plato-Aristotle-Peirce-Whitehead-Davidson theory.
>
> And by the way, you could also add the logician Alonzo Church
> to the anti-Quine, anti-nominalist group.  Church presented the
> following paper at Harvard, especially because he knew it would
> annoy Quine:
>
>    http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/church.htm
>
> Following is the title and opening paragraph of that paper.
>
> John
> _________________________________________________________________
>
> The ontological status of women and abstract entities
>
> By Alonzo Church
>
> Goodman says somewhere that he finds abstract entities difficult to
> understand.  And from a psychological viewpoint it is certainly his
> dislike and distrust of abstract entities which leads him to propose an
> ontology from which they are omitted.  Now a misogynist is a man who
> finds women difficult to understand, and who in fact considers them
> objectionable incongruities in an otherwise matter-of-fact and
> hard-headed world.  Suppose then that in analogy with nominalism the
> misogynist is led by his dislike and distrust of women to omit them from
> his ontology.  Women are not real, he tells himself, and derives great
> comfort from the thought -- there are no such things.  This doctrine let
> us call ontological misogyny...
>
> Source:  http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/church.htm
>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
> Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
> Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@ontolog.cim3.net
> Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
> Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
> To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J
> To Post: mailto:ontolog-forum@ontolog.cim3.net
>

Received on Friday, 4 September 2009 20:17:03 UTC