Comment: We Are Not Even At The Beginning ...

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Jim & All,

Re:

> SUO,
>
> I have posted 5 comments that present reasons for why this
> group should not commence work on the Merged Ontology.
> Have I missed any?   If not, let's focus on these
> comments and see if we can resolve each of them.
>
> Jim Schoening

My general attitude with respect to KIF,
and not especially about the self-styled
"base" document or "merged ontology" (MO),
is that we are not even at the beginning,
yet, of what it would take to start out
in the direction of any hope of success.

In its lack of integral capacities for
quotation, at minimum, much less for a
power and style of further "reflection" --
I cannot call an operation "reification"
until somebody shows me that it creates
or reveals a "thing" that is really new --
KIF, in fact, appears to take a couple
of steps backward from the Lisp 1.0
that I knew as a child, which leaves
us in the neigborhood of Lisp -1.0.

Without an integral facility for reflection --
and not just a syn-tacked-on capacity for it! --
we have no reliable way of detecting the difference
between the roles of signs and the rolls of objects,
no systematic way of sifting out and teasing apart the
artificial features of even our most natural of languages
from the intended to be known, invariant, natural, "objective",
and ultimate properties of the objects that we seek in Reality.
In short, and "shorted" to the points of ellipsis, ...,
we have no way to analyze, to become fully aware of,
nor thus to guide the ways that we conduct ourselves
in choosing, always choosing, wittingly or not,
to spin signs out in the search of an object.

I will comment on its logical incapacities,
from the standpoint of practical efficiency,
a lack that is hardly any special fault of it,
since it merely shares in the degraded condition
of the logical languages that a certain tradition
has seen fit to devolve "on us", but another time.

Cheers, Anyway,

Jon Awbrey

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Received on Saturday, 27 January 2001 08:21:48 UTC