How Deictic is Your Ontology?

George Rebane

While our Left, especially of the academic bent, assiduously works to stunt the English language – e.g. reduce/mangle the information carrying capacity of words – our technologists have been very busy expanding the language and introducing new words into English and other tongues.  This battle is both important and its outcome is not yet determined, although for most people the Left’s determination to limit speech and thought along Orwellian newspeak lines seems to be taking hold with their constituents recently from union schools now being tutored by even more radical mentors in our institutions of higher learning.

In the last century we discovered a strong determinant that limits thought is a person’s language(s).  An individual has a hard time thinking thoughts (e.g. formulating concepts and storing them) that his language does not support.  More formally, the structure and breadth of a speaker’s language determines his perception and categorization of experience. This phenomenon is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which we have reviewed here before.

While words like ‘discriminate’, ‘immigrant’, ‘hero’, ‘prejudice’, ‘stereotype’, ‘racist’, ‘climate change’, ‘misogynist’, … have been mangled beyond meaning, other words like ‘meme’, ‘network’, ‘hashtag’, ‘feedback’, ‘in-the-loop’, ‘online’, ‘email’, ‘variance’, ‘steady state’, ‘causation’, ‘transient’, ‘algorithm’, … have worked their way into everyday usage as our individual ontologies have expanded to keep pace with the times.  (Ontology? Please stand by.)

I recall it was as late as the 1990s when I used ‘algorithm’ in a meeting made up mostly of MBAs and lawyers, I was accused of lapsing into unnecessary and incomprehensible technical jargon.  When at the turn of the millennium things got so obviously complex with the spread of the internet and ecommerce, the lack of ‘algorithm’ in our lexicon just screamed for its adoption, so I responded by writing the one-pager most longtime readers have seen (here).  Today we can’t open a newspaper without running into ‘algorithm’ numerous times.  Nevertheless, today's innumerates continue giving grief to those from STEM fields who can describe complex systems, processes, and events with a word new to their ears – they'd rather take comfort in repeating ‘a small stealthy predator with claws given to hunting rodents’ when simply saying ‘cat’ would serve.

Nevertheless, in this vein, the language of the well-read layman continues to expand as technology and science infiltrate and push our horizons inward, outward, and all around.  I am guilty of using words without explanation that are common to my lexicon and literature (e.g. see ‘ontology’ here and here).  I figure if the reader is interested in the thought presented, then his looking up the unknown word online is both easy and expanding (in the Sapir-Whorf manner).  And if my reader doesn’t care, then neither do I; for I proudly trail in the shadows of my betters such as Buckley, Carroll, Tolkien, and Dennett.

Daniel Dennett is an internationally celebrated cognitive scientist, writer, and also happens to be my favorite atheist.  A number of his books decorate our shelves, and in his latest – From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (2017) – he slips in the confession that he wants to introduce ‘ontology’ into our everyday tongue.  In this piece, I call his ‘ontology’ and raise him a ‘deictic’.

As the good professor explains –

Ontology comes from the Greek word for thing.  In philosophy, it refers to the set of ‘things’ a person believes to exist, or the set of things defined by, or assumed by, some theory.  What’s in your ontology?  Do you believe in ghosts?  Then ghosts are in your ontology, along with tables and chairs and songs and vacations, and snow, and all the rest.  It has proved more than convenient to extend the term ‘ontology’ beyond this primary meaning and use it for the set of ‘things’ that an animal can recognize and behave appropriately with regard to (whether or not animals can properly be said to have beliefs) and – more recently – the set ‘things’ a computer program has to be able to deal with to do its job (whether or not it can properly be said to have beliefs).

So basically, your ontology is your universe of items, ideas, notions, beliefs, objects, history, and all that lends order to your perceptions of what is.  And when we consider this ‘order’ or structure, if you will, that itself delivers itself differently to many of us.  Some of us like to have an ontological structure where each thing has a known and accepted relationship to at least one other thing in our ontology, more often than not, it often enjoys relationships to several or many things.  When we think or ponder, we figuratively climb like a spider over the web that connects our things, often discovering more direct paths or relationships (‘new way of looking at it’), and sometimes finding out that an old relationship needs to be severed, it was erroneous and won’t work anymore.

And here we come to the notion of deictic referencing.  In a deictically connected and managed system or network or organization or ontology, every subunit is constantly querying or determining its relationships with other subunits, asking ‘where are you in relation to where I am now?’  And then it uses the answers to decide (algorithmically?) what it should do next (technically, what state it should enter next).  Nature is deictic in that, even in its most complex forms, it operates deictically without requiring an omniscient master controller to keep things working.  Demonstrations of deictic behaviors can be seen in the aerobatics of a flock of starlings or the precise convolutions of an entire school of sardines.

Science expands human knowledge in this manner by maintaining and expanding its ontology deictically.  Every new idea and advance is connected to and based on what is already established truth.  And when some scientist’s leap of imagination creates a promising island off the shoreline of accepted knowledge, then we get real busy trying to build a causeway and join the new island to the rest of what we know.  In other words scientists (and presumably other sane people) insist on expanding their ontologies deictically, or they abandon the island as another barren rock that bore no fruit.  But even then that deictic of failure survives to inform us of what worked and what didn’t.

Humans have now become smart enough to understand the technical underpinnings of how deictic structures simplify and enhance cooperation between different parts of even the most complex systems ranging from a microscopic folding protein, to an entire ecosystem, an economy and beyond.  From another perspective, we now understand why deictic systems and ontologies are computable – every part takes care of itself (works its algorithm) by having only ‘local’ knowledge of what its neighbors are doing.  Such local environments may grow, but they always tend to prune themselves, sometimes catastrophically, when things become too complexified.  Nowhere in the natural scheme of things do we find a big omniscient kahuna keeping an eye on everything and telling every part what to do now and next.

Well, that’s not entirely true.  The biggest contradiction to this can be found all around us in how humans conduct their affairs.  For millennia there have been certain humans and their supportive cohorts who have sought to be the big controllers, educating their minions by means fair and foul to discount all other relationships save that of subservience and compliance to the center of power – i.e. minimizing the deictic wherever it is found.  They used to be known as kings and conquerors, and some still are.  But today most are found in leviathan organisms known as the state, run by hubristic minions who confidently drape themselves with imaginary powers to plan and control while bestowing various forms of misery upon the rest.

So, how deictic is your ontology?

Comments

[Russ]

Reading this post reminded me of a conversation with a noted Social Scientist, Dr. A.B. Hollingshead, my father in law, about the use of words in social science writing. My question, to the head of Yale's Sociology Department, was "Why are academics always assigning new meanings to common words and inventing new words for everyday activities." He explained that was necessary to protect the profession from interlopers, to be a sociologist one had to learn the code works of the profession by working their way across the field and through the established academic gates. If you did not know the code works and the nuanced meanings of those code word, you could not be a professional sociologist. He offered that assigning meanings to words not commonly used was true of all professions, designed to keep the amateur and interlopers at bay. These terms and terminology are often used to vet another professional in social situations. Does this person know the code words? Ah ha, this person is a real engineer, I can speak freely with this person, using the language of my profession. Words are important, but knowing the nuanced code words is even more important.

[Russ]

How Algorithmic Thinking Can Help You Think Smarter

By Ali Almossawi

“What’s fascinating is that Babylonian tablets from the second millennium BCE reveal that ancient Babylonians wrote down their procedures for determining things like, say, compound interest or the width and length of a cistern given its height and volume using algorithms. And all throughout history, and in a variety of domains, one can see approaches to problems that resemble what we refer to today as algorithms.

That realization is intriguing for a number of reasons. One, it shows that this way of thinking about problems is rooted in ancient history. Two, it shows that it is domain-agnostic.

And so, if one were to consider how best to make algorithms compelling to the broadest audience, it seems only natural to strive to not sell the field short, by describing it in its narrowest form, but to rather frame it as a tool for thinking, and a general-purpose one at that. One that can be applied to everyday problems that may have nothing at all to do with computers.”

http://changethis.com/manifesto/show/152.02.BadChoices

This is the kind of thinking that our schools should be teaching along with spreadsheets.

[ScenesFromTheApocalypse]

This was surprisingly good.

'Understanding Fake News'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYXeNfxFfs4

[Account Deleted]

SFTA - re the Ytube video. He's OK, but too young to have a proper perspective on a lot of what he talks about. We had way worse and bloodier riots in the 60's (and earlier - Haymarket) than today.
He's totally wrong about how I respond to news accounts that touch on areas of knowledge that I have. I've always felt that if they're that screwed up about that item, then they're probably wrong about everything else they write about. I actually experienced that personally in high school. He seems to blame the growing divide on the news, but the reason we are divided is quite simple and as old as the hills: Freedom or free stuff. I know this sounds harsh - he is correct about a lot of what he's experienced. Over all, I give him a B-. I do believe he'll get better.

[Paul Emery]

Any way you look at it George it is a serious indictment of our educational "system" in that the best we can do picking a President is to come up with Clinton and Trump as our only alternatives.

[Gregory]

Can termites have invisible hands?

https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.110/PhysRevE.92.062810

Simple rules, local knowledge. You gotta do what you gotta do.

[Russ]

Gregory@01:11 PM

Bad link!

[Gregory]

damn

was reading the paper on another device,

https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.92.062810
but that looks like what didn't work. Hmmm.

Here's the complete citation export
@article{PhysRevE.92.062810,
title = {Network-based model of the growth of termite nests},
author = {Eom, Young-Ho and Perna, Andrea and Fortunato, Santo and Darrouzet, Eric and Theraulaz, Guy and Jost, Christian},
journal = {Phys. Rev. E},
volume = {92},
issue = {6},
pages = {062810},
numpages = {9},
year = {2015},
month = {Dec},
publisher = {American Physical Society},
doi = {10.1103/PhysRevE.92.062810},
url = {https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevE.92.062810}
}

try this
https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevE.92.062810

[Account Deleted]

"... Clinton and Trump as our only alternatives."
Actually, you can choose from several other candidates or even write in any of several million eligible humans.
The Dems ran a total liar and crook. A lot of other folks figured the best way to keep her out of the White House was to vote for anybody else. Trump at least recognises basic American rights such as equality before the law.
He won. Some people that don't understand how this works are unhappy.
Too bad.