Unlike Humpty Dumpty, I use the word “reality” in its natural usage. Reality to most people has nothing whatsoever to do with the physics of that situation but instead describes the subset of things we find valuable in our existence. That involves our personal situation as well as the situation of those around us.

To say that the reality faced by a college student taking NLP classes is the actual experience he gets in college is what most college students would agree to. The same is true of housewives, truck drivers, advertising executives and politicians.

In my opinion, the reality we each deal with is made up of our daily events, and their effects on our lives. Quarks and leptons don’t bother me much, and I certainly wouldn’t waste a lot of time developing an ontology for quarks and leptons. But I would certainly spend a lot of time developing tools and capabilities that let the students, housewives, truck drivers, advertising execs and politicians look at material on the web which relates to colleges, houses, trucks, ads and voters.

Not so much quarks and leptons.

I stand by my use of the word reality as I used it.

-Rich

Sincerely,

Rich Cooper

EnglishLogicKernel.com

Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2

-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F Sowa
Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2014 6:19 AM
To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontology is affected by Personality

On 1/28/2014 8:00 PM, Rich Cooper wrote:

> I use it [the word reality] in at least two ways...

As Humpty Dumpty said, you have the right to use any word in any way

that you please. But if you insist on doing that, you're not going

to be understood, or people will think you're being a crank.

The points I was trying to make:

1. We all have different backgrounds, preferences, habits, and

personal dialects (idiolects).

2. We also have conventions for communicating with other people

with other habits when we want to -- or when we don't want to.

3. For more effective communication with people (and for designing

computer systems that communicate more effectively), it's

important to recognize those issues.

> I don’t even think we live by any one ontology for much more than

> an hour or two at a time before moving to a new frame of reference,

> and therefore a new governing ontology.

That is true. But if you want to communicate effectively with another

person or a group of people, you have to negotiate a common vocabulary

and ontology with sufficient overlap to minimize the misunderstandings.

And that negotiation is continuously being renegotiated -- unless the

group agrees to (stipulates) some basic assumptions, either explicitly

or implicitly (common consent).

John

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