Dear Fil
wonderful to know of your experience in this area. The topic of part/parts/wholes has come up, from time-to-time on the group. I remember one reference to an engineer (I think) who had work out lovely mereotopological way of looking at the problem. Do you have any reference about design and mereology?
The leap to the table is my own - it is an extension that I see implicated when we take a phenomenological view - and/or an affordance view. I took this leap after looking at a KIF encoding of Roberto Casati and Achille Vari's Theory of Holes (http://mitpress.mit.edu.book-home.tcl?isbn=026253133X). One of the theorems announces that a hole must be able to be filled in order for it to be a hole. This would seem, to me, to be a leap of a similar order to my leap top a table. That is handle/cup/saucer as a whole would only seem top be possible, as a real world whole if there is a surface sufficient to maintain the whole.
I am most pleased if you can ads/subtract/alter my proposition in ways that are better suited to my purpose.
cheers
keith
>>> "Filippo A. Salustri" <[log in to unmask]> 12/14/10 11:31 AM >>>
Mereology; there's a word I haven't heard in a long time.
I used to work with mereotopology, and even published some preliminary work
with it, as a logic for describing product models from an engineering point
of view.
I was, at one point, quite up on current work in MT, but I never heard of
anyone inferring a table from (the parts of) a cup & saucer.
Got a reference or URL?
Cheers.
Fil
On 13 December 2010 17:46, Keith Russell <[log in to unmask]>wrote:
> Dear Adam,
>
> Yes, the conceptual differences between an Object system and a Structural
> system are distinct, especially at the level of programing. This is not
> equally the case at the operational level. That is, the ontologies of Object
> systems tend to stay inside the mind-set of logic rather than carrying
> forward an real world operational phenomenology.
>
> I have been mucking around with ancient stuff myself. Mereology
> (part/parts/wholes) seems to offer a cross-over insight into what I see as a
> basic flaw in computer (AI) translations of the real world. Husserl
> apparently mucked around with this stuff in his early writings and I can
> understand how he might go from the relationships of part/parts/wholes to
> phenomenology.
>
> In a simple example (talked about in a simplified way), we start with the
> handle of a tea cup (part) add it to a tea cup (parts) put these two on a
> saucer (whole) and, by implication, we have a table (flat surface).
>
> What do you thinK?
>
> And, yes, we forget yesterday in our rush to catch up with tomorrow. I like
> to play Who Wants to Be a Millionaire with my communication students. I ask
> them, for a million dollars, in which decade was the Fax machine invented:
> 1) 1840s 2) 1920s 3) 1980s 4) 2010s.
>
> cheers
>
> keith
>
>
> >>>>>>
> Adam Parker wrote:
> You raise an interesting puzzle - I was talking simply in the terms used by
> programmers of the day to highlight the era with which I would be
> concerned... There is a distinct conceptual difference between an object
> system like Smalltalk, and a structured system like COBOL or FORTRAN. Alan
> Kay once noted that object orientation was a practical Platonic joke, in
> that ideas (objects) gave rise to manifestations (instances). He also
> tellingly compared them to monads at the same point... (*The Early History
> of Smalltalk* Alan C. Kay *ACM SIGPLAN Notices* Volume 28, No. 3, March
> 1993
> Pages 69-95).
>
> What is remarkable is taking time simply leafing through these documents
> and
> discovering what has been known and for how long. I was looking yesterday
> in
> a cybernetics proceedings from the late 70's (the 1978 ICCS in Tokyo &
> Kyoto) and found a paper planning the first fiber to the home systems with
> several million planned subscribers, complete with suggested business
> models
> for services (the HI-OVIS prototype, see
> http://www.nmda.or.jp/nmda/HiOVISwhat.html). The core concepts of
> Facebook,
> Youtube, Gmail, Google were all there, clear to the hindsight eye, even
> though only 35,000 people ever received the service. Yet today, we here in
> Australia argue about it in public political discourse, as though it's
> never
> been considered before...
>
> (I'm amazed at how few people I meet in my field are aware that we already
> had mouse-navigated hypertext with video conferencing and groupware back in
> 1968... And just what that means for claims that new tech will necessarily
> revolutionise the world overnight.)
>
> >>>>>>>
>
--
Filippo A. Salustri, Ph.D., P.Eng.
Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Ryerson University
350 Victoria St, Toronto, ON
M5B 2K3, Canada
Tel: 416/979-5000 ext 7749
Fax: 416/979-5265
Email: [log in to unmask]
http://deseng.ryerson.ca/~fil/
|