More things in heaven and earth than in all your philosophy
While downloading some software this afternoon to (hopefully) set up a WebQ server, I came across this article by the ever-interesting Clary Shirky on the Semantic Web effort. It’s interesting both for the content and for the way in which basic philosophical approaches, in all their glory (?) are becoming concrete in a strange way. And, there are some nice syllogism examples, among them the following:
Consider the following assertions:
– Count Dracula is a Vampire – Count Dracula lives in Transylvania – Transylvania is a region of Romania – Vampires are not realYou can draw only one non-clashing conclusion from such a set of assertions—Romania isn’t real. That’s wrong, of course, but the wrongness is nowhere reflected in these statements. There is simply no way to cleanly separate fact from fiction, and this matters in surprising and subtle ways that relate to matters far more weighty than vampiric identity. Consider these assertions:
– US citizens are people – The First Amendment covers the rights of US citizens – Nike is protected by the First AmendmentYou could conclude from this that Nike is a person, and of course you would be right. In the context of in First Amendment law, corporations are treated as people. If, however, you linked this conclusion with a medical database, you could go on to reason that Nike’s kidneys move poisons from Nike’s bloodstream into Nike’s urine.