[Inquiry] Re: Examples! Examples! Examples!

[Jon Awbrey]

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EEE.  Note 33

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Example 1.  John Sowa's "Top Level Categories" (cont.)

There are a number of advantages to taking the semiotic or the
sign-relational view of logic.  For one thing it becomes possible
to consider our use of logical languages as a special case of more
general, that is to say, far less specialized and structured cases
of sign usage.  This helps to place the normative science of logic
within a larger context other normative sciences, and even further,
within the overlapping frames of the descriptive sciences that are
designed to study the actual course of adaptation, communication,
information, learning, and thought.

But for now I just want to focus on the concrete question of why
it is useful to have many ways to say the same thing, given that
we have to spend so much time after the fact trying to recognize
the equivalence or the near equivalence of different expressions
of the facts.  I think that getting some insight into the nature
of this phenomenon would take us a measured distance in the work
to achieve the intercoordination of diverse ontologies and views.

To get an object lesson in what this means, go back to the two
different axioms for TLC that I gathered at the following site:

http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10094.html

Consider the kinds of arguments that the champions of Axiom !a! and the
champions of Axiom !c! might get into about each and every item of their
nevertheless common discursive alphabet !TLC! = {Abstract, ..., Structure},
whether Actuality is a genus consisting of the species Object and Process,
as the Alphists say, or whether Actuality is defined as the conjunction of
Independent and Physical, as the Gammists say, when all the time there is
nothing of substance behind the appearance of contention.

Now, this is a dilbertly simple example, but I was taught that there
is a lot to be learned from isolating the roots of complex phenomena
in the _|_-most situations where something similar is found to arise.
So I think that these zeroth order cases are worth our due attention.

Jon Awbrey

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