Re: C.S. Peirce, Spencer Brown, and Me • 11
Re: Ontolog Forum • Michael DeBellis

MDB:

I’ve just started taking Peirce seriously in the last year or so and some of his more complex ideas still aren’t completely clear to me but here goes:  Has anyone come up with an OWL upper model (i.e., something like the upper models in Cyc and BFO) based on Peirce’s work?  I’ve come to appreciate Peirce as a major figure in the history of logic, information theory, semiotics, etc. but I’ve never quite been able to map his ideas into a logical model in OWL.  I’m not sure if this is because trying to do so isn’t consistent with what Peirce is trying to do or just that I still haven’t grasped his ideas completely.  Or perhaps the subset of FOL that OWL supports isn’t powerful enough to map to Peirce.  At an initial reading it seems like there should be a good fit because (at least as I understand it) one of Peirce’s core ideas of symbols (as opposed to icons or indexes) seems like a perfect fit to the triple model (Subject Predicate Object) that is the foundation (RDF/RDFS) for OWL.  Would like to know your opinions on this.

Dear Michael,

Google still reminds me I spent some time on the RDF-Logic List back around the turn of the millennium (January 2001).  I was especially intrigued by the prospect of using triples as a fundamental data structure.  Now the (subject, verb, object) triples of RDF and the (object, sign, interpretant) triples of Peirce’s semiotics are ostensibly different data types in their concrete descriptions but that may not obstruct integration too much if the triples are defined abstractly enough and implemented polymorphically enough.  As far as I can remember, though, the concrete connotations tended to get in the way of cross-cultural or trans-silo communication at that time.

That is not, however, the largest obstacle to harmonizing the logic of Peirce with the ways of FOL as she is spoke today.  I’ll take that up when I next get a chance …

Regards,

Jon

cc: Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Ontolog Forum • Structural Modeling • Systems Science