Topic :> Dynamics Of Ontologies -- Discussion

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JA = Jon Awbrey
BM = Bernand Morand

bernard,

with all the hubbub in the house my attention fades and
my concentration is scattered, but let me see if we can
bandy a few less words, and clarify a few more concepts.

maybe i read you wrong, but it seems that this issue of
conceptuality came up before in our discussion of the
pragmatic maxim.  is this the same worry as that?

there are many words in the "maxim of pragmatism" (MOP),
and all of them are important.  peirce emphasized some
of these words in some contexts and others in others.
why?  what call is there for the differential stress,
the difference in emphasis?  of course, at one place
he makes the narratively entertaining statement that
the young favor action and the old favor intellect,
and that makes for an amusing nostrum, if not quite
soppy pablum, but i find so much "loss of nerve" and
just plain wishy-washiness in the younger folks that
i e-meet these days that i'm afraid i must turn that
common coinage over to highlight its other side, that
many forms of self-styled "action" are all just hot air.

no, these transients of age and The Age aside, i think
that the deeper reason for variable tension in the MOP
is that it has to mop up many different floors, and so
the action words may need more elbow grease at one time,
while the concept words may need more push when it comes
time to shovel them into the hoppers of particular minds.

in the early years of the MOP, it just so happened that
airy philosoppy was all the rage, but this gave a false
view of how and why science works, especially, and thus
peirce was quite apt to stress the active and experimental
pieces of the work to clear up meanings, or else to clear
them away if there was nothing but hyper-heated air to them.

later, when the rage of fashion had raged on to radical, which
is too say, radically naive empiricism, he found it more needful
to italicize the conceptual imports of his original purportance.

now, the question becomes, what sort of time do you think we are having now?
well, the geist of the zeit seems to vary from place to place, does it not?

jon awbrey

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previously, on bufferin ...

BM: Are you not going into making some new kind of "usine à gaz"?
    This is a disease which often happens when trying to account
    for a process by means of a structure, despite the structuralist
    slogan that claimed that processes are nothing but structures :-)

JA: gas works?  i must not have the sense of the idiom.
    do you mean what we call a rube goldberg invention?

    http://www.rube-goldberg.com/
    http://www.anl.gov/OPA/rube/

BM: Yes, just that.  You know:  with pipes, gasholders, pumps,
    mixer taps, derived circuits and so on.  In computing that's
    how we call most of softwares:  usines à gaz (sometimes in honor
    of our Italian friends we call it "plat de spaghettis").  In short
    a tentative mechanical or energetic model for a conceptual problem.

JA: ha!  yes, we speak of "spaghetti programming" too.
    the kind of dyspepsia that structured programming
    was supposed to cure us of once and for all, but
    along came java x-presso and the arachnophiles
    of the semi-idiotic web ...

JA: but tell me, you mean to say you just 'conceive' programs --
    you don't have to write them, or debug them, or run them?
    tell me, please, where can i get a job like that?

JA: not to be confused with a goldberg variation,
    well, not in every case, at least.

JA: i dare say i spend my odd days thinking
    that structure is nothing but process,
    but sometimes, in dis-parity of the
    calendar, i lose track of the
    even and odd days.

JA: when the feast gets too movable, i prescribe a gas-x.

    http://www.pdrhealth.com/drug_info/otcdrugprofiles/drugs/fgotc125.shtml

BM: Oh yes, a very good medicine in order to
    make the process as simple as possible.

BM: Never confuse process with operations endowed with some efficient algorithm.
    Seems that to the list of dangerous things as women and fire, it would be safe
    to add ontologies.  But, sure, the calendar disparities will prevent you from that.

JA: you know me, the copenhagen interpretation was the very liebfraumilch of my childhood
    as a "student of physics" (sop), and so process-ism contra product-ism will sound like
    yet another galois-<esc> pseudo-duel-ism of wave-ism vs. particle-ism to my mind's ears.
 
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    -^-
  
JA: is it champagne,
    or alka-seltzer?

JA: take your pick, gimli.

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http://www.cs.bsu.edu/homepages/mighty/history.html
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