Re: do you know of
vet@cs.utwente.nl (Paul van der Vet)
Date: Wed, 7 Jun 1995 09:20:23 +0200
From: vet@cs.utwente.nl (Paul van der Vet)
Message-id: <9506070720.AA10367@athena.cs.utwente.nl>
To: fritz@rodin.wustl.edu
Subject: Re: do you know of
Cc: srkb@cs.umbc.edu
Sender: owner-srkb@cs.umbc.edu
Precedence: bulk
Dear Fritz,
> [...]
> On another topic: I am struck by the fact that _none_ of the
> papers I reviewed for your ontology workshop (nor my own paper) was mainly
> about an ontology. There was lots on how to generate them, evaluate
> them, combine them, etc., but no paper I reviewed dealt mainly with the
> ONTOLOGY ITSELF (unlike some of your papers which actually bite the bullet,
> or CYC and Penman). There still seems to be this bashfulness, that for
> some reason it is "unscientific" (or maybe "unmanly") to present
> the actual ontology as the main point of interest. Maybe it is just
> the selection of papers I happened to review, or maybe there is still
> a widespread mental/academic obstacle to presenting an ontology as
> a piece of scientific or engineering work.
That has nothing to do with bashfulness, but rather with prudent
publishing practice. We all want our papers published, don't we? There
is no point in writing a paper on, say, an ontology of imperfections in
materials and having it rejected on the ground that it does not address
the issue of Peirce's meaning triangle.
> On Mario Bunge: I don't know his work yet; I'm going to take a look
> at his books: Ontology I & II, The Furniture of the World and The World of
> Systems.
I have been wondering for some time when Bunge would turn up in AI, but
there he is. AI researchers are warned that they might not like one of
the underlying themes of the venture: that what there is in the world
is not a subject of independent philosophical (I add: or cognitive)
research, but is nowadays a subject of physical science.
Paul.
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Paul van der Vet Phone +31 53 89 36 94 / 36 90
Knowledge-Based Systems Group Fax +31 53 33 96 05
Dept. of Computer Science Email vet@cs.utwente.nl
University of Twente
P.O. Box 217
7500 AE Enschede
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