Kathryn Blackmond Laskey schrieb:
> At 9:39 AM -0600 6/13/07, Smith, Barry wrote:
>
>> [BS] I hope that we all agree that in major, critical, domains, such 
>> as medicine or nuclear power generation a good strategy for creating 
>> useful models is to seek to find out what the underlying reality is 
>> like.
>> 
>
> Of course.
>
> In a couple of decades of building models of phenomena, many of them 
> in major, critical domains, I have come to the conclusion that the 
> underlying reality of the world we live in is such that the best, 
> most useful models of many phenomena are probabilistic.
>
> When I say this, I get nods from many engineers who have been in the 
> trenches building models. They want to know about technologies for 
> building interoperable models.
>
> But ontologists tell me it is a category error to put probability in 
> the ontology, because probability is epistemic and not ontological.
>  (01) 
This is a widespread but wrong view. Start to read what Mario Bunge has 
written about the probability calculus as a purely mathematical calculus 
and what kind of interpretations it might fit - epistemic as well as 
ontological.  (02)
Ingvar  (03)
> IMO, is an example of counterproductive pedantry.
>
> Barry, you caricature Tom Gruber by saying he wants to build 
> ontologies of concepts while you're building ontologies of the world. 
> That ain't so. Anyone who builds an ontology is specifying a 
> conceptualization. A good ontologist specifies conceptualizations 
> that are as true to the structure of the world. But an ontology IS a 
> specification of a conceptualization. It is NOT a specification of 
> the reality. Only God can specify reality. We can describe reality 
> and act in it, but we can't specify it. We describe reality by 
> specifying our conceptualizations of it, arguing over them, refining 
> them, and hammering out consensus agreements on them.
>
> If we bite the bullet and admit that ontologies specify 
> conceptualizations [of a domain], then it's easy to argue that 
> conceptualizations should be allowed to have probabilities when we 
> don't have enough information for a complete specification. This 
> argument makes sense even if we don't think the probabilities 
> themselves are ontological.
>
> Kathy
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/ 
> Subscribe/Config: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/ 
> Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
> Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/ 
> To Post: mailto:ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>  (04) 
-- 
Ingvar Johansson
IFOMIS, Saarland University
 home site: http://ifomis.org/
 personal home site:
 http://hem.passagen.se/ijohansson/index.html  (05)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/ 
Subscribe/Config: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/ 
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/ 
To Post: mailto:ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx  (06)