BODY { font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12px;
}John, list
An extremely interesting post. Many thanks.
What can I say other than that - I agree with your outline and
suggestions to replace 'universal' with 'mathematical'.
That change also inserts a notion of Mind, an active Mind, into the
process - understanding 'mathematical' as an act of reasoning, while
'universal' brings to my mind more of a categorical definition.
Edwina
On Mon 20/08/18 11:10 AM , John F Sowa s...@bestweb.net sent:
Edwina and Mike,
I'll reply to your notes in the thread on virtual reality.
But first, I'm forwarding the note copied below, which I sent
to Ontolog Forum on Saturday.
Quine's Dictum: To be is to be the value of a quantified variable.
That principle led Quine, Goodman, and others to limit ontology
to a very narrow scope, which downgraded or banished nearly all
of Peirce's semiotic. That led me to publish an article on
"Signs and Reality" in the Applied Ontology Journal:
http://jfsowa.com/pubs/signs.pdf [1]
But some people objected to including a Peircean semiotic at
the top level of ontology. So I went one step further to draw
a fundamental distinction between mathematics and physics.
Then formal logic-semiotic would be a theory of pure mathematics
that could be applied to all the semiotic processes that occur
in the physical universe.
That is the background for the following note, which I would
like to mention in discussing your notes.
John
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: [ontolog-forum] Re: Possibility and actuality
Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2018
From: John F Sowa
To: ontolog-fo...@googlegroups.com [2]
...
Summary: The topmost level of an ontology should make one
fundamental
distinction that has an open-ended range of implications:
1. Physics is the science of actuality. It includes everything
observable by any means as well as the space-time that contains
everybody and everything. Its quantified variables refer to
patterns of actuality in existing things and processes and/or
any regions of space-time surrounding or adjacent to them.
2. Pure mathematics is the science of open-ended possibility.
Its quantified variables range over unbounded infinities
of patterns that may or may not exist in actuality. The
infinities of mathematics include all actual patterns that
have existed, do exist, or will exist plus infinitely more
that may never exist in actuality.
Azamat
>> [JFS] Summary: Ontology must accommodate all the levels. The
>> top-level distinction of mathematical/physical, logos/physis,
>> or signs/reality is a universal foundation that has inspired
>> philosophy for two and a half millennia.
>>
> [AA] Agree with the premise and conclusion.
Thanks for the note of support.
Eugene Wigner talked about the "unreasonable" effectiveness
of mathematics for describing reality. But the reason why
math is so effective is that its possibilities are infinitely
more numerous than anything that can ever be actual. The
challenge for science is to determine which ones are actual.
Re ISO standard: I believe that the terminology of Possible/Actual
and Mathematical/Physical is more acceptable for modern programmers
and computer scientists than the philosophers' terminology of
universals/particulars. I would put the philosophers' terms in
footnotes, not in the main text of an ISO standard.
Azamat
> Reality varies as zillion worldviews or conceptual frameworks.
We all share the same actuality. But the number of options
for describing or interpreting that actuality is infinitely
greater than the actuality.
But the reasoning methods enforce a discipline on the way those
patterns develop. Some interpretations and reasoning methods
will be successful -- and others will get you into trouble.
Azamat
> On other side, a philosophical physicalism insists that a physical
> TOE is the same as a philosophical (ontological) theory of
everything.
But there are infinitely more possibilities than actualities.
There is no guarantee that we will ever find an absolutely
perfect TOE. We have to make do with what we can find and test.
Leo
> One way to differentiate common, realist fiction from fabulist
> (fantasy, science fiction, magic realism) is that the former
> contrives new instances, while the latter modifies axioms at
> the class (universal) level.
My only change is to replace "class (universal)" with
"mathematical".
John
Links:
------
[1]
http://webmail.primus.ca/parse.php?redirect=http%3A%2F%2Fjfsowa.com%2Fpubs%2Fsigns.pdf
[2]
http://webmail.primus.ca/javascript:top.opencompose(\'ontolog-fo...@googlegroups.com\',\'\',\'\',\'\')
-----------------------------
PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L
to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To
UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the
line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at
http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
