Saturday, November 26, 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)
Communication from John Sowa to Paul
Prueitt made regarding views about logic.
Regarding the development of ontology hubs
From John Sowa,
Paul,
If you have a precise specification with many axioms, you
can delete any axiom and still have just as precise a specification as you had
before. But it will allow more
interpretations -- in other words, you could say that it is more ambiguous.
Each axiom rules out some possibilities. Each time you delete one axiom, you have
more options. If you delete them all, you
have no restrictions whatever, and things are possible.
When you can delete *all* the axioms, you have a statement
that says absolutely nothing. But it is
still precise.
These are elementary principles about logic.
John
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I asked John Sowa why he felt that logic has a privileged
ontological status.
His reply was:
It's
a subset of English and every other natural language. All you need to support full classical first-order logic are the
words "and", "not", and "some" plus the ability
to use them with ordinary English syntax.
You can throw in "or", "if", and "every"
as well, but they can be defined in terms of the above three.