Politics and Pragmatism in Scientific Ontology Construction
30 Oct 2021 - 12 Sep 2025
- In 2011 Carl Hewitt organized a workshop on "Inconsistency Robustness"; I took this as an excuse to indulge my penchant for half-baked philosophical flaming and wrote a paper based on my dissatisfactions with the state of knowledge representation in science. The paper and my slides are available.
- It was probably my most sustained effort to be a kind of Bruno Latour-ish constructionist and do battle with the naive realism that scientific computation usually assumes. Of course I never bothered to publish this in any place where it would find an audience, and it seems to have been cited exactly once, in a Polish paper:
- Dekonstrukcja artykułu naukowego. Ontologie w publikowaniu semantycznym
- Deconstruction of a scientific article. Ontologies in semantic publishing
Interesting propositions of epistemic attitudes that can be applied in this case include socio-pragmatic constructivism (Bjeković et al., 2014) and representative pragmatism (Travers, 2011).
- Ten years later and things haven't advanced at all as far as I can tell. I'm still building tooling for class-based ontologies because that is what people understand and know how to work with. The semantic web remains a distant vision; scientific knowledge remains as un-integrated as ever.
- My own pragmatism has led me to stop pretending to be a philosopher and focus on something I'm actually somewhat qualified to do, that is, building software and bringing what creativity I can muster to the task of bringing people and and the digital realm into a closer working relationship.
- One sign of hope is that the Roam-led burst of writing tools is starting to merge with semantic representation. Codex OS is a very interesting project in this space.
Incoming
- SlateStarCodex on Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions https://lorienpsych.com/2020/10/30/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-taxometrics/
- Maybe Barry Smith isn't quite the naive realist as I thought? Not sure what he has to say about metaontology, a search turned this up Directly depicting granular ontologies
But then e.g. pragmatic ontologists like Barry Smith can propose “rules” for metaontology that aren’t formal procedures but guidelines, which also themselves support metarationality, e.g. one of his rules is that ontology systems need good support for versioning and revision
— Mikael Brockman (@meekaale) April 17, 2021