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I try to bring up things such as the incoherence of trying to construct the notion of a set containing itself from the perspective of ontological engineering and get voted down on a non-ontological engineering basis. How can I best get these kind specific examples of ontological engineering questions answered?

Ideally I would like to see an ontological engineering tag on one or more of these forums.

Ontological engineering is comparable to the Richard Montague grammar of natural language semantics. They both provide the way for natural language semantics to be specified syntactically. Ontological engineering emphasizes the inheritance hierarchy compositional nature of natural language semantics. We can use these same things to stipulate formal language semantics. The Tarski meta-language can even specify its own semantics using itself.

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I made the case in the comments that ontological engineering questions that are ontological in nature seem perfectly acceptable. If you wanted to say, how does OWL relate to such and such a notion in a metaontological framework, then that makes sense. But if you are pushing technical questions related to the implementation of engineered ontologies proper, that the proper forum is https://ai.stackexchange.com/. I own multiple textbooks on AI and philosophy, and all of the material related to ontological engineering is in the AI textbooks, and not the ontology texts. Have you read any texts on ontology proper by which you can model language used to ask ontological questions through a philosophical lens?

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  • "I made the case in the comments that ontological engineering questions that are ontological in nature seem perfectly acceptable." none-the-less the question was still voted down and you were one of the ones that put it "on hold" death trap.
    – PL_OLCOTT
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 0:53
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    Clever the way you avoided the question posed!
    – J D
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 3:41
  • I have reverse-engineering my knowledge of ontological engineering from scratch. The only book that I read on it is the CYC project's detailed documentation on their CycL. This documentation is apparently no longer available. Why did you vote to close my post if you agree that my point is reasonable?
    – PL_OLCOTT
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 3:50
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    Ah. I think if you're interested in ontological engineering, you should get a book on ontology and read it. Here's an introductory text.
    – J D
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 4:07
  • That is not even the same subject. The philosophical term [ontology] is not this: google.com/…
    – PL_OLCOTT
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 4:23
  • I was interested in showing that the notion of anything totally containing itself is nonsense, thus the notion of a set containing itself was nonsense when Russell first wrote his paradox.
    – PL_OLCOTT
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 4:26
  • @PL_OLCOTT - I would agree that Russell should have spotted the problem at the start. He didn't invent his paradox, just became associated with it. But I have no idea how ontological engineering relales to ontology. The overlap appears quite slight. .
    – user20253
    Commented Dec 20, 2019 at 13:49
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    @PeterJ Ontological engineering is comparable to the Richard Montague grammar of natural language semantics. They both provide the way for natural language semantics to be specified syntactically. Ontological engineering emphasizes the inheritance hierarchy compositional nature of natural language semantics. We can use these same things to stipulate formal language semantics. The Tarski meta-language can even specify its own semantics using itself.
    – polcott
    Commented Dec 22, 2019 at 15:42
  • @PL_OLCOTT And this overlap between theory (ontology) and praxis (ontological engineering) is why Cyc says "No particular degree or training is required; some of our OE’s never graduated high school, but most of them have their Ph.D., many in Philosophy with competencies in symbolic logic." If you want to engineer an ontology, it's better to have ontologists.
    – J D
    Commented Dec 22, 2019 at 16:00
  • @polcott - Thanks. Nothing to do with ontology in its usual meaning then.
    – user20253
    Commented Dec 22, 2019 at 17:48
  • @PeterJ It relates to exactly this part of the conventional meaning of ontology: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology ... how such entities may be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences.
    – polcott
    Commented Dec 22, 2019 at 20:01
  • @JD - For me ontology is the study of what exists. I get that 'engineering' makes use of ontological terms and ideas (hierarchies, categories etc) but don't see much connection. I have no idea what the 'metaphysics of machines' might be or 'human metaphysics' or how they could be becoming 'functionally closer'. I feel the words are being abused. Not your fault I know. .
    – user20253
    Commented Dec 23, 2019 at 11:30
  • My mistake! I misread.
    – J D
    Commented Dec 23, 2019 at 20:17
  • @JD - No problem. I deleted two comments to clear away the misunderstanding. We seem to agree on the need for ontologists to do ontology. . .
    – user20253
    Commented Dec 26, 2019 at 13:34
  • @PL_OLCOTT - Russell's paradox is the greatest problem in ontology.and metaphysics and it is an expert issue, so I feel you would need to study the problem in ontology before importing it into ontological engineering. It's a problem that arises for the nature of existence, not for higher level theories and schemes. Hence it arises in naive set theory and not the calculus. So I'd suggest asking about R's paradox in ontology to begin with, and then you can transfer the issues into engineering as seems relevant.
    – user20253
    Commented Dec 26, 2019 at 13:46

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