Motor ontology

[Jon Newman]

This is some thought provoking stuff. Now provoke yourself.

[Jon Newman]

I've been following the blog entries of John Wilkins at the Evolving Thoughts blog and he has a recent series I want to link to in this thread. It's titled The Ontology of Biology and is very informative. Great reading!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

If you're only going to read one, consider Part 3.

[Diane]

I love this paragraph from Part I:

I aim in this series to argue that in fact the ontology of biology is a radical challenge to the default western way of thinking and causes us to be very uncomfortable where we literally and figuratively live. In particular, the problem of change and knowledge under change, which is I think the core problem of western philosophy since Heraclitus, is radically underlined by the theories of evolution and ecology. There is a tendency for us to try to force living things into defined kinds of a standard ranking, and to make inferences as if things in the living world were A or Not-A, when in fact they are not only distributions of traits, but changing distributions of traits, and changing distributions of changing traits - not only do legs vary in length and size, they change in their variation over time, and sometimes they change from being legs, to being wings, for example, or flippers, or even disappearing.

He is saying (much better than I was able to) that life is more of a verb than a noun.
And that it tends to drive all native English speakers/thinkers, with our proclivity to think mostly in nouns, a bit crazy, if not all "Western" thinking.

[Jon Newman]

Diane,

I had a slightly different take. An ontology is about nouns but nouns with a distribution and nouns that change over time, so be prepared and be flexible.

Maybe I'm wrong though?

[Diane]

I was interested in his second sentence:

ontology has gone the way of taxonomy, being dragooned into service of database techniques, to mean something quite the opposite of what it originally meant.

Right away I wondered, ah, is he going to explain the way words get shoved around and squeezed into being nouns when they should mean some kind of moving cohesion? Processes? My selective attention looked for such, and the bit I quoted above seemed to support my new bias against calling verbs by nounish names, the fallout of dealing with the static quality nouns confer on things that were meant to move and change in accordance with everything around them.

Your take is more practical than mine.

[Jon Newman]

John Wilkins has a podcast and pdf available on this topic. Check it out