Re: rdfs:class and rdfs:resource

Wolfram,

Your explanation is very nice and I agree with it :-)
It demonstrates that there is not logical paradox.

However my perplexity was a little bit more meta-physic :-)
I try to explain the matter, even if it's not easy.

Think of an universe consisting of possible worlds where each world is made
up of things and:
1) things are instance projection of ideas,
2) ideas are things themselves,
3) within each world there exists the idea of "idea".
4) the speculative mechanism for the thinking things of a world is that a
"thing" assumes to  perceive the ontic nature of another thing only if the
idea of this latter thing is part of its world and a relation of projection
can be deduced,
5) everything whose ontic nature can be perceived by a thing of a world is
part of this world itself,
A first pair of questions could be:
How many worlds exist?
A thing of a certain world, provided with its basic speculative mechanisms
only, can deduce that other worlds exist?
However, at the moment do not consider these ontological questions. Suppose
that a certain world exists and consider it.
Imagine that a thinking thing of this world, say Bill, wants to speculate
over the creation of the world itself. Provided with the ontological
mechanism he can leverage (i.e., that every immanent thing is a projection
of an idea), Bill can perceive that a sort of meta-physic idea of creation
exists (say the idea of "everything") and that both himself and the idea of
"idea" are instance projections of this basic idea. Further more, since this
general idea is an idea itself, he can argue that this idea is an instance
projection of the idea of "idea". Doing so, our hero came to the perception
of the ontic nature of the world since he succeeded in confining the
"creation" within an immanent context.
The question now is: would this be a paradox? if so, does our hero committed
a mistake?
Well, I think that it would be a paradox and that Bill did a serious error.
The error is that he deduced that the abovementioned meta-physic idea is
itself an idea (i.e., an instance projection of the idea of "idea"). In
fact, what really is part of the world is the perception of the existence of
the meta-physic idea, not the idea itself. The real deduction of our hero is
that only the phenomenal nature of the meta-physic idea (that let him
perceive its existence) is an idea (i.e., a projection of the idea of
"idea"), not the meta-physic idea itself. Therefore, the only assertion he
can do is that the phenomenal nature of the meta-physic idea is part of the
world, not its noumenal nature.

In conclusion, rdfs:Resource is the meta-physic idea and rdfs:Class is the
idea of "idea". Saying that rdfs:Resource is an instance of rdfs:Class is a
paradox if by asserting this we want to say what rdfs:Resource is. It is not
a paradox only if, by asserting that rdfs:Resource is an instance of
rdfs:Class, we want to say that we can perceive the phenomenal nature (not
noumenal) of rdfs:Resource as being an instance of rdfs:Class. In all cases,
we can only assume that rdfs:Resource exists by itself, that we can perceive
its existence from its phenomena projections and that we can categorize
these phenomena as something similar to the projections of our world (in
fact, this is the only reason because we can perceive the existence of
rdfs:Resource). But we cannot deduce (neither assert) that rdfs:Resource is
part of our world, we can only deduce that it exists and that its phenomenal
nature only is part of our world.
Therefore, when we say <Class about="Resource">, we cannot deduce what
Resource is, but only how we can perceive it.

I hope nobody will insult me :-)

Francesco

Received on Thursday, 8 May 2003 06:00:04 UTC