Understanding the true ontological structure of the world is very non trivial, and you might want an improved language to do it in before get finished.
I don’t think that you need to know the ultimate truth to learn useful things from applied ontology to design a better language than you would design if you ignorant of applied ontology.
I think this is one of those cases where philosophy is helpful and it makes sense to read people like Barry Smith.
If you want to speak about obligations (may/should/must) it makes sense to not simply copy the existing words of the English language but first read serious philosophy on what kind of categories of obligations exist. Yes, the resulting language won’t be perfect but it will be better than the language that you will be building when you simply copy English.
I’ve looked into the subject of ontologies (I did research on knowledge base design years ago). The problem wasn’t finding ontologies, but finding non-arbitrary ontologies. That is, no matter how one ontology categorized entities, you could always find another that categorized them differently, and no non-arbitrary reason to select one over the other. And I didn’t want to give in to the temptation to just choose one and use it regardless. I finally gave up and decided that treating each concept in isolation (for the purpose of dictionary building) was better than using an ontology that some users might find highly counter-intuitive.
I finally gave up and decided that treating each concept in isolation (for the purpose of dictionary building)
What do you mean with that sentence? That you want to use the ontology of naive English?
If we would have a name for 75 that’s isolated from the name for other numbers it would be quite hard to do math.
Ordering enities into categories provides the possibility to systematize them instead of making everything a special case.
If you look at Lojban’s place system is a huge mess because it has specific rules for the places of every single gismu.
When it comes to feelings, I think the distinction of feelings/emotions/moods and physical sensations (pain/warmth etc) is highly useful.
It makes a language more difficult to learn to have more distinctions but it makes the language more functional. A person gains something when they learn it.
I don’t think that you need to know the ultimate truth to learn useful things from applied ontology to design a better language than you would design if you ignorant of applied ontology.
I think this is one of those cases where philosophy is helpful and it makes sense to read people like Barry Smith. If you want to speak about obligations (may/should/must) it makes sense to not simply copy the existing words of the English language but first read serious philosophy on what kind of categories of obligations exist. Yes, the resulting language won’t be perfect but it will be better than the language that you will be building when you simply copy English.
I’ve looked into the subject of ontologies (I did research on knowledge base design years ago). The problem wasn’t finding ontologies, but finding non-arbitrary ontologies. That is, no matter how one ontology categorized entities, you could always find another that categorized them differently, and no non-arbitrary reason to select one over the other. And I didn’t want to give in to the temptation to just choose one and use it regardless. I finally gave up and decided that treating each concept in isolation (for the purpose of dictionary building) was better than using an ontology that some users might find highly counter-intuitive.
What do you mean with that sentence? That you want to use the ontology of naive English?
If we would have a name for 75 that’s isolated from the name for other numbers it would be quite hard to do math.
Ordering enities into categories provides the possibility to systematize them instead of making everything a special case. If you look at Lojban’s place system is a huge mess because it has specific rules for the places of every single gismu.
When it comes to feelings, I think the distinction of feelings/emotions/moods and physical sensations (pain/warmth etc) is highly useful. It makes a language more difficult to learn to have more distinctions but it makes the language more functional. A person gains something when they learn it.