[topicmaps-comment] (Fwd) [PORT-L] Talk at ICCS'2001

[Bernard Vatant <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>]

Murray has been talking about PORT lately.
Here's the kind of stuff you can find there.
Reading certainly relevant to our ongoing debate on everchanging 
subjects :))


------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date sent:      	Fri, 19 Oct 2001 02:22:09 EST
Send reply to:  	sowa@bestweb.net
From:           	"John F. Sowa" <sowa@BESTWEB.NET>
Subject:        	[PORT-L] Talk at ICCS'2001
To:             	PORT-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU

Following is the abstract and the URL for the talk that I
presented at ICCS'2001.  I had hoped to finish the paper
in time for the proceedings, but I didn't.  Then I had hoped
to finish it before I gave the talk, but I didn't.

However, better late than never.  Following is the URL and
the abstract of the paper.

Section 7 is not yet completely finished.  I intend to add
a bit more info, mostly along the lines I presented in Ch 6
of my KR book.

John Sowa
______________________________________________________________

Source:  http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/signproc.htm

                  Signs, Processes, and Language Games

                        Foundations for Ontology

                              John F. Sowa

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.

                  Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

Abstract.  According to Heraclitus, panta rhei -- everything is
in flux. But what gives that flux its form is the logos -- the
words or signs that enable us to perceive patterns in the flux,
remember them, talk about them, and take action upon them even
while we ourselves are part of the flux we are acting in and on.
Modern physics is essentially a theory of flux in which the
ultimate building blocks of matter maintain some semblance of
stability only because of conservation laws of energy, momentum,
spin, charge, and more exotic notions like charm and
strangeness. Meanwhile, the concepts of everyday life are
derived from experience with objects and processes that are
measured and classified by comparisons with the human body,
its parts, and its typical movements. Yet despite the vast
differences in sizes, speeds, and time scale, the languages
and counting systems of our stone-age ancestors have been
successfully adapted to describe, analyze, and predict the
behavior of everything from subatomic particles to clusters of
galaxies that span the universe.  Any system of ontology that
is adequate for defining the concepts used in natural languages
must be at least as flexible as the languages themselves:  it
must be able to accommodate all the categories of thought that
are humanly conceivable and to relate them to all possible
experiences, either directly by human senses or indirectly by
whatever instrumentation any scientist or engineer may invent.
As a foundation for such an ontology, this paper proposes the
philosophies of three logicians who understood the limitations
of logic in dealing with the both the flux and the logos:
Charles Sanders Peirce, Alfred North Whitehead, and Ludwig
Wittgenstein.

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