Sunday, November 27, 2005
Center of Excellence Proposal
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ONTAC stands for Ontology and Taxonomy Coordinating Working Group
It is a working group of
Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP)
Paul,
Of course, as you said:
“But there is the position that inference creates its own appearance of
truth, when in fact that measurement of facts has been (may have been) made
erroneously.”
But some people believe anything that comes out of a computer, and other people believe anything that is printed in a book. That doesn't mean you should throw out computers and books. ( see [247] )
Following are some quotations from Alfred North Whitehead, who was the senior author of the _Principia Mathematica_, one of the most influential books on logic since Aristotle [1].
If you want to summarize his approach in a single line, I'd suggest the last one below: "We must be systematic, but we should keep our systems open."
John
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<quote from Whitehead>
Human knowledge is a process of approximation. In the focus of experience, there is comparative clarity. But the discrimination of this clarity leads into the penumbral background. There are always questions left over. The problem is to discriminate exactly what we know vaguely.
Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.
The conjunction of premises, from which logic proceeds, presupposes that no difficulty will arise from the conjunction of the various unexpressed presuppositions involved in those premises. Both in science and in logic, you have only to develop your argument sufficiently, and sooner or later you are bound to arrive at a contradiction, either internally within the argument, or externally in its reference to fact.
It should be noticed that logical proof starts from premises, and that premises are based upon evidence. Thus evidence is presupposed by logic; at least, it is presupposed by the assumption that logic has any importance.
The premises are conceived in the simplicity of their individual isolation. But there can be no logical test for the possibility that deductive procedure, leading to the elaboration of compositions, may introduce into relevance considerations from which the primitive notions of the topic have been abstracted.... Thus deductive logic has not the coercive supremacy which is conventionally conceded to it. When applied to concrete instances, it is a tentative procedure, finally to be judged by the self-evidence of its issues.
The topic of every science is an abstraction from the full concrete happenings of nature. But every abstraction neglects the influx of the factors omitted into the factors retained.
We must be systematic, but we should keep our systems open.