Issue 98036 | Editor: Erik Sandewall | [postscript] | ||
18.4.1998 |
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Today | ||||
In today's newsletter, Sergio Brandano (Pisa) proposes to return to the basic question for the discussion on ontologies of time: why are alternative time ontologies needed? If you wish to go back and see how the discussion got started and how it has proceeded, please use our web page, click for "discussion sessions", and proceed to the discussion about ontologies for time.
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Debates | ||||
Ontologies for timeSergio Brandano:Salve. The following are some fragments from the current discussion: From Pat Hayes - ENRAC 14.3.1998
Here in Pisa, we write ``continuity'' and we read ``axiom of completeness'', which is what everyone commonly means when speaking about (the founding notion of) continuity. I really find it difficult to believe that you like to make an exception in this sense, also because the hat here is ``formal (temporal) reasoning''. It also seems to me that any temporal structure must necessarily fail to be persuasive if on one hand it includes the notion of continuity and on the other it refuses it; how can time be continuous ... with some exception? Either it is continuous, or it is not! That is, either the Basic Time Structure assumes the axiom of completeness, or it does not!! In fact, in this discussion I have not yet seen any explanation why an alternative notion of continuous structure is needed at all? I am not asking you to argue about your own notion, I just ask you to give a convincing argument on the need of a notion which is an alternative to the classical one, such as: ``the problem P of temporal reasoning about actions and change can not be solved adopting the axiom of completeness'', or ``the axiom of completeness is too strong an assumption for our purposes; axiom A is better suited, because...''. Sergio
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