Things vs Stuff, Individuals vs Commodities

In thinking about "what is a thing?", I had this brain fart about the dividing line between things that have an individual identity and "commodities" or "substances". That dividing line is between those things that are chosen or manipulated by "amounts" rather than "names". I.E. When you ask for X number of things (a dozen donuts), or Y ounces of stuff (an ounce of prevention ;-) (i.e. mass nouns), instead of asking for "that one" (i.e. using an indexical), you are referring to things that may actually exist as separate things (e.g. pork bellies, batteries, molecules) but they are so similar that we quit referring to individual ones as individuals. EVEN WHEN picking out a single screw from the basket of screws at the hardware store, it doesn't really have an individual identity! We picked "one", not "that one", much less "Joe".
In fact, to give "names" back to things that have become commodities, we resort to assigning serial numbers to make them each unique.

[Ed. Note - 11/21/07: as per my disclaimers, once I start looking for my epiphanies on the net, I find them. E.G. in this case, see "Conceiving of entities as objects and as stuff". Congrats Bruce, you've just discovered that there are mass nouns vs count nouns.]

POSTSCRIPT - >March 11th, 2010

It turns out that our notion of stuff versus things is so intuitive that they are already being processed by different brain parts during visual processing, long before making any "conscious" decision. At http://www.journalofvision.org/4/8/510/ see Cant, J. S., Valyear, K. F., & Goodale, M. A. .. (2004). 'Stuff' versus 'things': Neural processing of the material properties and geometric form of objects in human visual pathways [Abstract]. Journal of Vision, 4(8):510, 510a, http://journalofvision.org/4/8/510/, doi:10.1167/4.8.510.

Different orders of Polymorphism

When most computer science texts refer to polymorphism (in the context of object oriented programming) they are referring to either refining the implementation of a method via subclasses overriding that method, OR, by defining more than one behavior (method) with the same name. The former case (hopefully) preserves the semantics of the method name, the latter overloads multiple semantics on the same name. In either case, it is only the method that is multifaceted, not the entire object much less the class hierarchy.

With Existential Programming, a different order of polymorphism (i.e. "a single entity can take on multiple forms") is at work. Here a single entity in its entirety can take on multiple forms. Heck, it can take on multiple ontologies (aka class hierarchies). This means either supporting multiple (albeit, fundamentally similar) views/conceptions of an entity, OR, trying to knit together very different models where the object instance is in some sort of oscillating Schrodinger's Cat-like state (except that we can look at it and not affect its state :-).

Rationalism of the Semantic Web a Flaw?

In thinking about how knowledge is represented in the real world, it occurs that, in addition to the traditional rational representation via human and formal languages, there are at least two other biggies: DNA and neural nets.

Many, if not all, of the things we learn are represented in our brains as complex networks of (mathematical) functions that are simulated in computers via the technique of neural networks. And, if you have ever looked at the data associated with a neural net that has been trained to, say, recognize a handwritten letter "A", you've seen how there isn't any way to put that knowledge into words. In fact, it is not clear by simply looking at a net's matrix of fuzzy weights that it knows anything at all, much less what it knows!

In a similar vein, DNA obviously encodes tremendous amounts of knowledge, like how to make a beating heart, that are also very hard to translate into explicit "facts". In fact, DNA, like self-modifying source code in Lisp, is hard to verbalize because what it "does" can be very far removed from what is "says".

Now because the whole theory and strategy of representing knowledge via "facts", whether in a traditional database, or a semantic network, assumes that everything can be put into a fact format, there are huge amounts of knowledge in the world that can't be used. Yes, one can simplistically use a BLOB to stuff anything reducible to a number string into a database tuple, but that doesn't really put the knowledge into a form that can be "reasoned" about via inferencing rules. And it is that sort of inferencing that is the rationale behind the Semantic Web and why we should bother to create it.

Is this a (fatal) flaw in the foundation of the Semantic Web? Many philosophers have claimed it is a fatal flaw in Rationalism which is the philosophical equivalent to semantic networks. Phenomenologists insisted that many other flavors of knowledge had to be handled beyond the ones covered in rationalism and logic. How will the semantic web handle these? Is it even possible philosophically?