[pfooti]

A diversion into the pedantic, but hear me out: I'm legitimately interested in terminology here.

This actually seems more like ontology work than epistemology work. In one of my academic fields (I do software, education, and the learning sciences), we tend to use the term "epistemology" to be knowledge about knowledge itself. Generally questions like "where does the ontology of pizza come from?", or "who has claim on saying what is and is not a pizza, and where do they derive that claim?" are epistemological ones, and mapping out the state of different claims are ontological ones.

Is 'epistemology', as used here to mean more of a meta-ontology a common word usement that's being structured these days? Is it something from clojure or one of the other lisp-y spaces people are building ontologies? I played with building ontologies about epistemology (specifically, nature of science, quality of scientific claim, etc) using KQML back in the Dark Ages of 2000 or so, but haven't really looked at the work since then.

[phillord2]

I am using the term "ontology" to mean "a description of truth", and "epistemology" to mean "how do we know what truth is". Of course, these are philosophical definitions, which (as the article says) are not necessarily that applicable.

The article in question uses OWL -- which is a subset of first order logic -- to illustrate the point. Clojure is (in this article) just a syntactic wrapping.

[pfooti]

Ah, that certainly makes sense. The article was a hoot, BTW - speaking as both a philosophy geek and food geek.

[phillord]

Thank you!