Re: [topicmaps-comment] Notions have existence .....

["Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@home.com>]

I was mulling over a post like this, but Ivan has said everything I had in
mind and so much more elegeantly!

Thanks, Ivan.

Cheers,

Tom P

[Ivan Uemlianin]

> A brief tupennorth on this debate: abstract objects are useful whether
> they're real or not; subjectIdentity elements are useful either way;
beware
> technical solutions to non-technical problems.
>
> [This is not intended to be a response solely to SRN's post, even though
it
> looks that way]
>
> Steven R. Newcomb:
> > Maybe I've been
> > brainwashed by 2,400 years of thinking based on Plato's
> > ideas.  On the other hand, maybe Plato and I have
> > simply had the same unshakeable intuition that every
> > idea is necessarily unique, has identity, and exists
> > regardless of whether anybody happens to be thinking
> > about it at any given moment.  I think it would be
> > awfully hard to explain the phenomenon of language --
> > information interchange -- in the absence of such an
> > intuition.
>
> There *are* traditions which deny the reality of abstract objects (e.g.
> Aristotle and onwards).  These traditions are well represented in current
> philosophy of mind and language, not to mention the natural and social
> sciences.  Explanations of the phenomena of language - e.g. in linguistics
> and psychology - are getting on quite nicely without reference to the
Forms.
> Even if one regards the biologically deterministic cognitive science of
the
> Chomsky/Fodor tradition as a kind of crypto-Platonism, there's plenty of
> mainstream work in philosophy (e.g. social externalism), linguistics (e.g.
> HPSG) and psychology (e.g. connectionism, behaviourism,
> social-constructivism) which is either agnostic on or hostile to the
> Platonist view.
>
> But ... surely it doesn't matter whether abstract objects are real or not.
> It makes no difference for most work in mathematics, the natural and
social
> sciences and the humanities, so why should it matter with topic maps?  For
> example, it's hard to think of any work on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony to
> which it would make any difference whether the abstract object
'Beethoven's
> Fifth Symphony' was real or whether it was a convenient conventional
fiction
> to facilitate discussion and research.  In any case the usefulness of
> subjectIdentity elements for explicit indications of a topic's denotation
is
> obvious.
>
> Steven R. Newcomb:
> > Topic maps simply aren't
> > meaningful unless each topic has exactly one changeless
> > and eternal subject.
>
> I think this might be a bit strict.  From a Platonist point of view all
> abstract objects (Forms) are necessarily changeless and eternal.  However,
> as humans do not have direct access to the Forms (shadows on the cave wall
> and all that), getting the subjectIdentities right might be a bit tricky.
> More seriously and practically, most of the things we want to talk about
are
> not changeless and eternal, at least from the human point of view (e.g.
> people, countries, interchange syntax standards): to adopt Platonist
> rhetoric, the abstract object/Form 'Tony Blair' may be changeless and
> eternal, but the concrete object which is its manifestation is not.  In
> these cases the above criterion would be more useful - while retaining the
> intent - if it were weakened to something like 'each topic should have
> well-defined borders of changeability' (if Tony has a liver transplant
he's
> still Tony, but if he has a brain transplant ... ?), but even this has the
> potential to become a philosophical can of worms (Ship of Theseus and all
> that).
>
> Perhaps realistically the best we can say is that best practice is to have
a
> topic's subjectIdentity element point to some resource that everyone can
> agree either is or refers to some entity.  The resource could be kept
> up-to-date.  This resource could well be a topic element - in the absence
of
> direct access to Forms, what better way to define a subject (notion/idea)
> than a comprehensive and authoritative listing of the subject's
> characteristics.  The terms 'circularity' and 'infinite meta-level
> regression' spring to mind.
>
> No doubt such authoritative reference topics will emerge / are emerging.
In
> the meantime - and even after - topics without subjectIdentity elements
will
> arise along with questions of if/how they should be merged.  These
questions
> are not technical.
>
>