The object in perspective
June Power · ACM SIGPLAN OOPS Messenger · 1993
From the Conclusions The philosophy of language has indicated that there are serious omissions in the Cartesian theory of categorisation; notably, that members of a category are related by family resemblances and not necessarily by shared properties between members of categories. As observed by Lakoff, these findings are also in conflict with other popular positions held in the Artificial Intelligence community which view human reason as completely abstract, as well as assuming that every cognitive process is algorithmic in nature; that thought is purely a matter of symbol manipulation [9]. The former of these does not agree with findings of categorisation phenomena which imply that basic level concepts are characterised by basic-level perception and imaging capacities. The problem for the latter position is that the only way it can make sense of the understanding of two different conceptual systems is by means of the translation of one into another, or the translation of both into a third system. Understanding in terms of experience does not eliminate such organisational differences, so this is a problem which needs to be addressed. Self-organising activity will involve, minimally, the management of information, its representation both within a given organisation as well as across organisations and the effect of system evolution on the object. The object model, as currently based on the Cartesian view of categorisation, may not be sufficient for these requirements. Instead, it may need to accommodate what have been termed the holistic aspects of knowledge representation and categorisation. In any event, in order to define a set of requirements for self-organising architectures, we will need to bear in mind not only the object, but also what is implied by the object.