We are developing a method for gathering principles and fundamental design ideas from our sources, and bringing them together in groups related to common themes.
We are beginning this process with a few potent quotes from John Sowa. Comments are indented.
| John Sowa on Concepts |
| From Conceptual Structures: Information Processing in Mind and Machine, Addison-Wesley, 1984, Chapter 7.3, Conceptual Relativity, p.344 |
 |
| Concepts are inventions of the human mind used to construct a model of the world. They package reality into discrete units for further processing, they support powerful mechanisms for doing logic, and they are indispensable for precise, extended chains of reasoning. |
|
|
|
Concepts are inventions (they are created by the human mind; they are not somehow "pre-existing"). They are used for "construction". They are combined to "build a model of the world."
They package reality into discrete units. What makes concepts into "units"? How are they a "package"? What is that package made out of, and what does it contain?
As discrete units, they have meaning in logic and support "precise extended chains of reasoning."
This "integral ontology" project is based on this idea as stated by John Sowa, and is an attempt to generalize this idea across all kinds of concepts and categories.
|
|
| Concepts are ad hoc: they are defined for specific purposes; they may be generalized beyond their original purposes, but they soon come into conflict with other concepts defined for other purposes |
|
|
|
This should be a foundational principle for any approach to universal or top-level ontology. Concepts emerge in a specific context driven by a specific situation and specific motivation. This is one reason why a general-purpose mathematical taxonomy is not really possible, because human agreement and discretion is inherently necessary in forming a definition, and this agreement cannot be defined in general terms.
|
|
| Concepts and precepts cannot form a perfect model of the world – they are abstractions that select features that are important for one purpose, but they ignore details and complexities that may be just as important for some other purpose. |
|
|
|
This is the essence of abstraction, and has been described by other theorists in similar terms. Abstractions are generalities, presumed to be true of a broad class of objects or instances.
As such, they "omit measurements" that are true only of some instances of the category and preserve those that are true of all.
|
|
| Can anything be defined precisely? The answer is that the only things that can be represented accurately in concepts are man-made structures that once originated as concepts in some person’s mind. |
|
|
|
This is an important point. Herbert Simon's book The Sciences of the Artificial introduced this idea.
Concepts are "synthetic". They are human constructions, following the dimensionality of human measurement and the partitioning of reality into discrete measurable units.
|
|
| The crucial problem is that the world is a continuum and concepts are discrete. For any specific purpose, a discrete model can form a workable approximation to a continuum, but it is always an approximation that must leave out features that may be essential for other purposes. |
|
| Since the world is a continuum and concepts are discrete, a network of concepts can never be a perfect model of the world. At best, it can only be a workable approximation. |
|
|
|
We pick aspects of the world that are important to us for some reason, and we measure and define those aspects in terms of labels and dimensions.
|
|
| By drawing distinctions and giving names to the things distinguished, language separates figure from ground. Consider a tree. It has no sharp boundaries between parts; yet words divide the tree into trunk, roots, branches, bark, twigs, leaves, buds, knots, flowers, seeds, fruit, and even finer subparts such as veins in the leaves and pistils in the flowers. Even the boundary between the tree and the environment may be indistinct: the tree may have started as a sprout from the root of another tree and may still share a root system with its parent and siblings; insects and animals may be living in and on the tree; a vine may be climbing up the trunk, moss may be on the bark, fungus may be growing on a dead branch, and bacteria in root nodules may be supplying nutrients. |
|
| The arbitrary way that words cut up the world was emphasized by the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956):
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds – and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way – an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. (p. 213) |
|
| Discrete concepts divide the world into discrete things. The arbitrariness of this division is a common theme of Oriental philosophers. Lao Tzu said, “The Nameless is the origin of heaven and earth, the Named is the mother of all things.” The world flows according to the unnamed Tao, but the differentiation of the world into discrete objects is a consequence of the discreteness of the conceptual mechanisms and the words that reflect them. By meditation on paradoxical sayings or koans, Zen Buddhism seeks to undermine a person’s conceptual system and promote a direct experience of conceptual relativity. |
|
|
|
Can we understand "the undifferentiated continuum" as "the same thing as the Tao"? This seems to be a sensible interpretation. The idea relates to the "tabula rasa" concept: reality is an unmarked undifferentiated continuum with no boundaries and no definitions.
Then human motivation arises, symbolic representation becomes helpful, and languages and distinctions and concepts are introduced into human thinking. The binary and codified options of "duality" are introduced into human awareness.
Opposites emerge -- and the potential for human disagreement becomes codified.
|
|
| The division of the world into distinct things is a result of language. The philosopher Searle (1978) elaborated that point:
I am not saying that language creates reality. Far from it. Rather, I am saying that what counts as reality – what counts as a glass of water or a book or a table, what counts as the same glass or a different book or two tables – is a matter of the categories that we impose on the world; and those categories are for the most part linguistic. And furthermore, when we experience the world, we experience it through linguistic categories that help to shape the experiences themselves. The world doesn’t come to us already sliced up into objects and experiences: what counts as an object is already a function of our system of representation, and how we perceive the world in our experiences is influenced by that system of representation. The mistake is to suppose that the application of language to the world consists of attaching labels to objects that are, so to speak, self identifying. On my view, the world divides the way we divide it, and our main way of dividing things up is in language. Our concept of reality is a matter of our linguistic categories. |
|
|
|
Searle uses the term "counts" -- by which he means something like "is identified by a unique abstract label" -- a word, a name, a concept. We slice reality up into words -- into discrete packaged units labeled with a word.
|
|
