τεχνοσοφια

Since my staff.washington.edu account will soon go away, I’ve moved the site to my personal domain for the time being.  If you have bookmarked the old hard-coded URLs, you’ll need to change your bookmarks.  The persistent URL for Technosophia is http://purl.org/net/leftwing/blog, and the feed link is http://feeds.feedburner.com/technosophia. 

It’s likely that I’ve missed some links and broken some others.  If you notice any problems, drop me a line.  Hopefully this shift will not affect my small and strange audience.

I have idly been considering the ontologies proposed by Gottlob Frege in The Thought, and revisited in Karl Popper’s Objective Knowledge, in which there are three distinct realms of existence. Moreover, I wonder how envisioning such ontologies from an object-oriented perspective might provide a structured way of thinking about existence without need of dualistic theories.

A good question to raise is “what particular reason might you have for thinking that an object-oriented perspective is at all relevant here?” I have no answer for that other than “if we can mash-up web services, why not theoretical frameworks?” A glib and dorky answer, I admit, but I challenge the reader to name but one discipline where this sort of haphazard duct-taping of theory does not occur. But I digress.

In both of these ontologies, the first realm is that of physical objects: things one can see, smell, taste, touch, or hear. (This is an oversimplification, of course. One risk is suggesting that subjective perceptions, such as hallucinations, are objective phenomena perceptible by others. If I see a flying pink elephant and no one else does, is it “real?” I also run the risk of hinting that imperceptible, physical entities do not exist.)

The second realm consists of mental entities, though Popper and Frege diverge at this point. Whereas Popper thinks all non-physical entities live in the second realm, Frege confines the second realm to only those non-physical entities which consist in private or subjective ideas. Take the example of the concept of pi and my belief that “beer is good.” Popper would say that both of these entities belong in the second realm of his ontology: Frege would say that only the second is a second-realm entity.

The latter notion makes more sense in light of Frege’s third realm, that of objective, non-physical entities. A good example is the Pythagorean Theorem which exists independently of the mind of Pythagoras; although Pythagoras discovered the Theorem, it was not a private or subjective idea of his invention; it was merely his expression of an otherwise objective property of the physical world (i.e., first realm), which anyone of a certain intellect might have discovered upon due thought and experimentation.

Popper lumps the Pythagorean Theorem, which Frege considers to be an objective entity, in with other subjective entities such as my idea that beer is a tasty beverage. Popper sees the third realm as “the totality of all human thought embodied in human artefacts,” a realm of objective knowledge. However, does he mean to suggest that a subjective, second-realm idea committed to a physical, first-realm object becomes something ontologically different upon their combination? Do these entities warrant their own realm of existence? Popper’s vision of third realm sounds more like an interface between the first and second realms than like a realm all its own. An example of such an interface is human perception, which allows us to form second-realm ideas about first-realm entities by virtue of our innate sensory and cognitive abilities.

Frege’s and Popper’s views may be simplified by thinking about ontological realms in terms of object orientation as this perspective defines clear and structured relationships that are applicable to such thought. Issues such as the nature and number of interfaces between the realms and the consumption and immensity of space in the realms, for instance, may be addressed with conceptual apparatus that already exist in the object-oriented perspective. An ontology consisting of one object-oriented realm, rather than a number of realms, also has the benefit of emerging from the murky depths of dualism, for those who are inclined to reject dualistic theories.

An object-oriented ontology based on Frege’s conceptual divisions, summarized very briefly, would view: the physical realm as the main container object, that which contains all other objects, consisting of electro-magnetic radiation, matter, and physical forces; mental realms as distinct member objects of the physical realm, particular and distinct configurations of energy and matter resulting in concepts that are physically imperceptible; a “realm” of public, objective, non-physical entities as properties of first-realm objects, which are perceptible in the first realm and deducible (a la Pythagoras) in the second realm.

For a better thought out alternative object-oriented ontology, see Object Orientation Redefined.

The title makes this post sound rather more interesting than it is.

In light of my recent announcement, I figured I would make sure that the three of you who are reading this — assuming my mother and wife are still following along — have bookmarked the durable URLs.  (Durable, at least, to the extent that they will live on after my 9/20 resignation date at UW.)  The persistent URL for Technosophia is http://purl.org/net/leftwing/blog.  The URL for Technosophia’s feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/technosophia.

I’ll be moving Technosophia and my CV (which is of great and obvious value to the internet tubes) to a new server in the coming weeks, hopefully with very little disruption (especially for those who’ve bookmarked the durable URLs).

Though I will miss Seattle and my colleagues at the University of Washington, I am leaving to work at Princeton University Libraries as a digital library developer.  I’m looking very forward to helping design their repository infrastructure and building repository tools.  This is a fabulous opportunity to continue my work on digital libraries, and for my wife and I to return home to the Garden State.

Still, it will be difficult to leave an area we’ve grown so fond of, and especially to leave the family and friends we have up here.  There’s a certain bittersweetness I experience with every move, and this is perhaps both the most bitter and the sweetest I’ve felt about a move yet; I can think of no other cities I’d rather live than Seattle.  But that ol’ Dorothy was right: there is no place like home.  And home, in this case, happens to be the place where our closest family members and most of our friends reside, and also an area with perhaps the greatest number of career opportunities for a digital librarian-up-and-comer like me.

I’d also like to express appreciation for the code4lib community, and especially the #code4lib IRC channel.  Without them, I likely would never have learned of this position.  I’ve been meaning to post about how code4lib has changed my thinking about the profession of librarianship; but suffice it to say that I feel indebted to this wonderfully resourceful and visionary community for broadening, to a great extent, my perspective on library technology.  I’ve benefitted greatly from their knowledge and diverse points of view, and have felt welcome in the community from the outset. 

code4lib++