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Email messages from John Sowa

Subject: What is the difference between knowledge and wisdom.
Body:
This question broadens the thread far beyond the original issue
of a Hippocratic oath for ontologists.  But it's relevant to many
questions about the ways that human thinking (and language) differ
from the formalized systems in our computers.

JFS
>> This is the kind of advice that a wise old physician might give to
>> a young MD or PhD who is full of "book learning", but lacks the
>> clinical experience about how to apply that learning in an emergency.

KI
> The response above triggered the question above. As was the case
> with Data and the Datum, there is scant information about how one
> clearly distinguishes Knowledge and Wisdom.

The first point I'd make is that knowledge is essential for wisdom,
but it is not sufficient.  But I also believe that wisdom is not
limited to humans.  Some pet owners, farmers, and naturalists who
spend years living with animals in the wild know that.  But I won't
elaborate on that point because it would take us too far afield.

There's a lot of nonsense written about left-brain vs. right-brain
thinking, so I hesitate to raise that issue.  Instead of saying
that that wisdom resides in one side or the other, I believe that
wisdom requires an *integration* of all aspects of all modes of
thinking, feeling, knowing, perceiving, interpreting, and acting.

I gave a talk recently that covers some of those issues.  I put it
together from slides I used in other talks, but I also added some
new slides to show how they're related:

    http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/relating.pdf
    Relating Language to Perception, Action, and Feelings

The material in Sections 3 and 4 covers issues we haven't discussed
in Ontolog Forum.  For background on catastrophe theoretic semantics,
see the readings on the last slide.  The following survey about
René Thom is 36 pages long, but you can browse through it:

http://www.hum.au.dk/semiotics/docs2/pdf/bundgaard_peer/rene_thoms_semiotics.pdf

For Section 3 of the talk, I borrowed a lot from Chapter 3 of the
book by Wolfgang Wildgen (with his permission).  For more detail
about some of the diagrams I used, see

http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/homepages/wildgen/pdf/LexiconandBasicSyntax.pdf

In later chapters of that book, Wildgen sketched out a way of using
those ideas for interpreting narratives, but he and his colleagues
did not implement them for computer processing.  But Arun Majumdar
(listed as coauthor of those slides) did implement a version, which
has produced some very useful results.  He contributed some of the
slides (and *all* of the implementation) for Sections 3 and 4.
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