About
Search
Page Contents
Incoming links
from Protocols/Symposium 2025
- I also gave an impromptu lighting talk based on Politics and Pragmatism in Scientific Ontology Construction, which suddenly had a protocol-like aspect. Specifically, we need knowledge sharing protocols that can deal with divergent ontologies, as opposed to the rigid logic-based tools we have.
from Weird Studies/Eyes Wide Shut
- Sort of like sameness and categories rigidly defined by their properties is square, man. Kind of the point I was trying to cutely hint at with my idea for prototype-based representation in Politics and Pragmatism in Scientific Ontology Construction maybe?
from Weird Studies/Mechanical Dollhouse
- Typologies (should point them to Politics and Pragmatism in Scientific Ontology Construction )
- Typologies are a problem for GOFAI, less so for ML, where ontology is not specified but supposed to emerge from the inherent structure of the data.
from Future Fossils/Weird Studies
- Plural ontology. I guess my Politics and Pragmatism in Scientific Ontology Construction is a pretty boring version of that.
from Richard Rorty
- I cited him in Politics and Pragmatism in Scientific Ontology Construction, naturally enough...don't know if I did him justice.
from @Writing and Representation
- This paper was a big influence on the evolution of my own thinking about representation, and one of the founding documents of Narrative Intelligence. Oddly for such a work that I found so important, it has very few citations: Google Scholar (13 at present, one of which is Politics and Pragmatism in Scientific Ontology Construction )
from Deleuze
- This seems relevant to Politics and Pragmatism in Scientific Ontology Construction which was I guess Deleuzean without knowing it.
from Sussman, Programming is fun
- Amen, should send him Politics and Pragmatism in Scientific Ontology Construction
from Carl Hewitt
- My own presentation at the 2011 workshop was on Politics and Pragmatism in Scientific Ontology Construction, where I was lightly mocking the idea of consistent formal ontology. I also participated in a panel organized by Fanya Montalvo on the Singularity, and did a short presentation on How to Avoid the Singularity, apparently I was taking pokes at rationalists even back then. This talk was trying to connect Hewitt's ideas with Latour, in a jokey way.
from Data and Reality
- Want to cite Politics and Pragmatism in Scientific Ontology Construction paper, not sure if that is relevant or if it is too something (pretentious, abstract)?
from alpha ontologist
- Any ontology project has to deal with the fact that our formalisms for representing knowledge are impossibly inadequate to their given task. The standards in vogue nowadays (OWL, the official ontology standard of the semantic web) are particularly hard to use. (See Politics and Pragmatism in Scientific Ontology Construction )
Politics and Pragmatism in Scientific Ontology Construction
30 Oct 2021 - 12 Sep 2025
- In 2011 Carl Hewitt organized a workshop on "Inconsistency Robustness"; I took this as an excuse to indulge my penchant for half-baked philosophical flaming and wrote a paper based on my dissatisfactions with the state of knowledge representation in science. The paper and my slides are available.
- It was probably my most sustained effort to be a kind of Bruno Latour-ish constructionist and do battle with the naive realism that scientific computation usually assumes. Of course I never bothered to publish this in any place where it would find an audience, and it seems to have been cited exactly once, in a Polish paper:
- Dekonstrukcja artykułu naukowego. Ontologie w publikowaniu semantycznym
- Deconstruction of a scientific article. Ontologies in semantic publishing
Interesting propositions of epistemic attitudes that can be applied in this case include socio-pragmatic constructivism (Bjeković et al., 2014) and representative pragmatism (Travers, 2011).
- Ten years later and things haven't advanced at all as far as I can tell. I'm still building tooling for class-based ontologies because that is what people understand and know how to work with. The semantic web remains a distant vision; scientific knowledge remains as un-integrated as ever.
- My own pragmatism has led me to stop pretending to be a philosopher and focus on something I'm actually somewhat qualified to do, that is, building software and bringing what creativity I can muster to the task of bringing people and and the digital realm into a closer working relationship.
- One sign of hope is that the Roam-led burst of writing tools is starting to merge with semantic representation. Codex OS is a very interesting project in this space.
Incoming
- SlateStarCodex on Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions https://lorienpsych.com/2020/10/30/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-taxometrics/
- Maybe Barry Smith isn't quite the naive realist as I thought? Not sure what he has to say about metaontology, a search turned this up Directly depicting granular ontologies
But then e.g. pragmatic ontologists like Barry Smith can propose “rules” for metaontology that aren’t formal procedures but guidelines, which also themselves support metarationality, e.g. one of his rules is that ontology systems need good support for versioning and revision
— Mikael Brockman (@meekaale) April 17, 2021