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Saturday, November 26, 2005

 

 The BCNGroup Beadgames

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Challenge Problem  à

 Center of Excellence Proposal à

 

 

 

 

Discussion about ONTAC forum

ONTAC stands for Ontology and Taxonomy Coordinating Working Group

It is a working group of

Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP)

 

 

Communication from John Sowa to Paul Prueitt made regarding views about logic.

 

Regarding the development of ontology hubs

 

Reply to this communication

 

From John Sowa,

 

Paul,

 

If you have a precise specification with many axioms, you can delete any axiom and still have just as precise a specification as you had before.  But it will allow more interpretations -- in other words, you could say that it is more ambiguous.

 

Each axiom rules out some possibilities.  Each time you delete one axiom, you have more options.  If you delete them all, you have no restrictions whatever, and things are possible.

 

When you can delete *all* the axioms, you have a statement that says absolutely nothing.  But it is still precise.

 

These are elementary principles about logic.

 

John

 

****

I asked John Sowa why he felt that logic has a privileged ontological status.

 

His reply was:

 

It's a subset of English and every other natural language.  All you need to support full classical first-order logic are the words "and", "not", and "some" plus the ability to use them with ordinary English syntax.  You can throw in "or", "if", and "every" as well, but they can be defined in terms of the above three.