Thursday, December 15, 2005
Communications on lattice of theories
Peter Kugler, one of Rosen's students, made a short comment on Rosen at [304].
Chris, you are confusing the early Wittgenstein from the later Wittgenstein. He himself made it clear that his position in Tractatus was incorrect. But the difference has to be understood as moving away from the assumptions that the W3C now makes about semantic web possibilities.
The additional idea of a lattice of models ordered by deductive mechanisms was Tarski (I believe) and others, not Wittgenstein. I do not think that you will find him speaking anywhere about an infinite set of models. He might of, but I do not think so.. please correct me if I am mistaken.
Language games was an "invention" of Wittgenstein's in his later years in order that he could say, as is said in Topic Maps standard, that there is a referent "out there" which cannot be put into a one to one correspondence to the token in language (his first statement in the Tractatus).
Now look, I do not have my library with me.... and I may be incorrect as to how I have organized my understanding of Wittgenstein.
But the "language games" is late Wittgenstein and the one to one correspondence is the early.
The Topic Maps adopted the later Wittgenstein and the W3C adopted the early.
Now someone who I respect once told me that he did not agree with the above characterization of the differences between Topic Maps and RDF... I never understood why he disagreed, but I am still listening to get my own understanding in proper order.
I ask that all in the forum read the short paper by G Edelman:
Biochemistry and the Sciences of Recognition
and think about his life long struggle to define a specific alternative to the notion that were popular when he started his career. The alternative was that the immune system, in fact all of biological activities/processes, were purely instructional.
This notion about instruction was advanced by Linus Pauling.
Pauling and other were forceful in stating science in these terms, without ever having a final proof that instructions existed for all biological processes. Edelman had an internal drive because he read the two central figures in theoretical immunology (Burnet and Jerne) as suggesting something else.
The divide between Darwinian and non-Darwinian ways of thinking is NOT the way to look at Edelman's work, as he himself represents the pressure of evolution as having a structural ordering ....
Polemics are created in great abundance by those who have not done their homework and have not been completely open. Edelman himself talks in this 2005 paper about his awareness of the blind-spot that WE all have. Perhaps it is by recognizing that we have a blind spot that we can remain open to evidence and not argue based on how we would like the conclusions to be.
Some folks in the W3C camp really want to say that Topic Maps has nothing of value that OWL does not already have. The early verses late Wittgenstein is one way I have seen that there is a authoritarian viewpoint (the W3C or Pauling or Tarski) and then there is one which is attempting to deal with the degeneracy (Edelman's word) found in biological induction (see previous post)
In my mediations last night I realized that the discussion in this ONTAC working group eforum had come to the point where progress is generally stopped by some type of agreement not to flame each other over philosophical issues.
I hope that we can instead make a transformation of the discussion in the direction that John Sowa and I are setting up.
Paul Prueitt