Saturday, November 19, 2005
Center of Excellence Proposal
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John (Sowa)
It is understandable that you have this viewpoint. I have a different viewpoint, and that is that inference and logic has failed to be applied to any formalism sufficient to address the types of process questions that come up in real life in very day situations. (Prueitt, 1995) [1]
I have the opinion that logic and mathematics fail to provide the formalism required to model complex systems (as in living biology or social systems). At a minimum, there is nothing as yet that succeeds for living systems in the way that logic and mathematics was successful in the engineering sciences.
The critical point here is that this failure MAY NOT BE because we have not found the right way , but because of the limitations inherent in the actual processes involved in mental event formation.
This point requires evidence from cognitive neuroscience, and is NOT a philosophical point or something to be debated.
I use the definition "ontology is a set of concepts", because this definition does not require any logic to act on the elements of the ontology. The ontology is "merely" a set of concepts and relationships defined between the concepts... with NO REQUIREMENT FOR INFERENCE. This definition moves us closer to Topic Maps and away from the W3C Semantic Web standard.
John, since this is an impasse between you and I, and between others and I; I have to ask that you not be the authority here but help move through the impasse by acknowledging the critical point that I have raised, ie the failure and the possibility that the failure (of logic systems) cannot be overcome ..
Quasi Axiomatic Theory suggests that situational logic can be developed to reflect each instance where the instance is the emergence of some new reality (such as any time there is a part whole relationship where new functions are actually being addressed by the whole). So the poly-logics and multi-logics and quasi-logics might be a possible path forward. But NOT Aristotle’s logic.
[1] Prueitt, Paul S. (1996a). Is Computation Something New?, published in the Proceedings of NIST Conference on Intelligent Systems: A Semiotic Perspective. Session: Memory, Complexity and Control in Biological and Artificial Systems. October 20-23. Also at http://www.bcngroup.org/area3/pprueitt/kmbook/Chapter2.htm