INFO 202 Fall 08 Blog

In determining facets or categories for a set of objects, we might tend to think that some facets are better than others because they are more inherently essential to a particular set of objects.  I believe this is a dogma we should be careful to avoid and as a result I argue that we can only be pragmatic in evaluating ontologies.

In Two Dogmas of Empiricism, Quine calls it the first dogma of empiricism that some questions can be answered by appeals to the meanings of the terms while other questions can only be answered by appeals to experience of the world.  He goes on to show in great length that there is no sharp difference here — the “meaning” of the term and its particular analytic properties are not special.  While at first it may seem that “All bachelors are unmarried” and “All swans are white” are verified in different ways (the first just by looking at the meaning of “bachelor”, the second by investigating the world’s swans), Quine shows that on careful consideration, this distinction is quite blurry and they are verified in the same way.

Similarly, there are not two classes of properties — the essential and the non-essential* — from which we can decide upon the best facets for categorizing a group of objects.  (The same argument applies to the ontologies that we created last week — there are not objects or words that are essential to a particular domain, any vocabulary choices you made were not inherently right or wrong.)  In fact, there are infinitely** many ways we can categorize “tools” and many very simple ones can achieve the goal set forth to categorize both the original 10 objects and any set of 5 objects the TAs might throw at you.  (For example, consider the single, boolean facet “Existence” which has the headings “Exists” and “Doesn’t Exist”.)

What should we do then, if there is no inherent advantage/disadvantage to any one facet or vocabulary?  Quine’s blunt conclusion is that his arguments will cause “a shift toward pragmatism.”  Carnap is a little more explicit (he’s discussing the question of whether abstract entities exist, but it’s applicable to any ontological questions about language frameworks):

For those who want to develop or use semantical methods, the decisive question is not the alleged ontological question of the existence of abstract entities but rather the question whether the use of abstract lingusitic forms [or a particular set facets or vocabulary we create] is expedient and fruitful for the purposes for which semantical analyses are made, viz. the analysis, interpretation, clarification, or construction of languages of communication, especially languages of science.

Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology by Rudolf Carnap***

This seems just right — we created vocabularies that were handy in their naming and granularity for whoever was using our vocabulary and we should choose facets that are useful for whatever our particular purpose is.  I think Professor Glushko agrees when he states that the critical piece is “to choose an appropriate scope (and hence, an intended user community)” (emphasis mine).  To repeat, the decisive question is just whether a particular ontology is fruitful, not whether it’s somehow ontologically better or worse.  We must be pragmatic and results-focused in evaluating our ontological decisions, if for no other reason than there is no clear alternative.

This will also, I hope, cast doubt on such projects as the Colon Classification system which rely on fundamental categories and semantic universals in order to organize and describe all information for all purposes.

Notes:

* It might be said here that my real complaint is with Aristotle and essentialism rather than with empiricists and meaning.  But I contend that the same arguments will have the same implications.  As Quine says (in the same paper), “the Aristotelian notion of essence was the forerunner, no doubt, of the modern notion of intension or meaning.”

** Infinite?  This may be bounded, depending on how you define it, but at least as large as the number of possible groupings of N distinct objects where N is the number of tools.

*** There was a question in class last week about how ontology differed in philosophy vs. in our creation of vocabularies.  I believe the key difference is that the ontology in philosophy is at a meta-level.  Rather than investigating what the things are in a particular domain (which we did as vocabulary-creators), philosophers investigate what it means for something to be a thing and question, for example, whether abstract things exist.  This piece by Carnap is an example of philosophical ontology since it’s discussing whether these abstract entities actually exist and whether we should accept them.