Re: Misclassification of packages; "libs" and "doc" sections
Thomas Hood wrote:
> I'd prefer the term 'Class' since 'Category' has a particular
> meaning in philosophy (viz., "ontologically fundamental class":
> this is Aristotle's use of the word). Thus, perhaps:
Well, if you're too worried about the word's philosophical connotations,
let me do some phil. rant here :)
That's of course what I intended. In fact, the term "Class" is
not at all different. First, they're synonyms in English.
Second, they're quite often used interchangeably in ontology
research. For instance in cognitive science or AI.
And, it indeed implies the meaning in Aristotle's use. It
is associated with ontology, and not epistemology. So, in a
sense there's an implicit Platonism in all of this. :)
No need to worry for these terms, though. They're all common
English words, I preferred "Category" due to the fact that it
doesn't carry the plethora of misleading semantics of "Class" from
the practice of computer programming. :) [ I feel I'm just
about to see some C programmers telling me that using classes
would slow down the package browser *<:) Or perhaps some
Java programmer is going to tell me that a class can have only
one superclass (multiple interfaces are permitted though!) :) ]
Nice to see people interested in the thought part of things here!
Cheers,
--
Eray (exa) Ozkural
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
e-mail: erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr
www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo
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