
Getting to “Philosophy” - thejerz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy
======
xefer
I wrote this several years ago if anyone is interested:

[http://xefer.com/wikipedia](http://xefer.com/wikipedia)

It's not perfect but I enjoyed working on it

~~~
flippant
Your project looks really cool, but it would be great if one could share a
link to a query.

~~~
xefer
Thanks. I will put that together. Really I should have done that from the
start.

------
barbs
It reminds me of how, if you ask why something is so, and then keep asking
"why?" to every answer you get, you tend to end up asking philosophical
questions.

------
pierrec
A good friend of mine is a student of philosophy, and I often argue with him
about the importance and usefulness of the discipline. His favorite metaphor
on the matter goes like this: If each domain of science was a finger,
philosophy would be the thumb. It's the one that the others should rest upon
when being used.

Of course, I always dismiss his metaphor as pie-in-the-sky ridiculous. But I
must concede that this phenomenon occurring on Wikipedia gives a lot of weight
to his argument.

~~~
mannykannot
Ask him for contemporary examples of philosophy's usefulness to science. While
on the subject, you might want to argue that philosophy has become too self-
referential to be relevant.

I don't think the Wikipedia phenomenon means a whole lot. Here's an
alternative metaphor: philosophy is the pot we put all the loose ends in,
until some advance in science allows us to work on them some more. That
doesn't mean philosophy is making progress on them.

~~~
shabda
Here is a contemporary example:
[http://www.technologyreview.com/view/542626/why-self-
driving...](http://www.technologyreview.com/view/542626/why-self-driving-cars-
must-be-programmed-to-kill/)

~~~
mannykannot
Philosophy is something of a grab-bag of disparate disciplines, and I agree
that ethics can often (and should) inform public policy.

~~~
foldr
> Philosophy is something of a grab bag of disparate disciplines

So is science.

Please don't tell me we're going to play that tedious game where we give you
lots of examples of philosophy's relevance and your response is just "oh but I
didn't mean _that_ kind of philosophy".

~~~
mannykannot
No, I am actually agreeing that this is a valid example, though it is not
really a matter of science. As for all the other examples that you allude to,
I will consider them case-by-case.

------
emw
It's also fun doing this on Wikidata with "subclass of".

* Go to a Wikidata item, e.g. "sailboat" [1]

* Click on the "subclass of" (P279) value or, if no such value exists, the "instance of" (P31) value

* Follow the "subclass of" chain up to "entity" [2]

You can do the reverse -- i.e. go down the classification tree -- with tools
like Wikidata Generic Tree [3].

\---

1\.
[https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1075310](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1075310)

2\.
[https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q35120](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q35120)

3\. [http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-
todo/tree.html?q=Q35120&rp...](http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-
todo/tree.html?q=Q35120&rp=279&depth=2&lang=en)

------
dreamfactory2
Does this only apply to philosophy or do x degrees of separation allow you to
substitute any other topic?

~~~
shawndumas
It's funny you should ask because last night my son and I were looking at the
periodic table of elements. He said "boy, I bet you just by clicking on links
we could get to pumpkin"; and we did.

Not quite the same but fun nonetheless.

~~~
drewrv
Sounds like he might like this: [http://thewikigame.com/6-degrees-of-
wikipedia](http://thewikigame.com/6-degrees-of-wikipedia)

~~~
thaumasiotes
I've tried it, but it doesn't seem to register me. I'll join a game, it will
keep a count of my clicks, I'll find the goal, and then it will say "no win".
Then the game will time out and I'll see "no winners in the last game". What's
going on here?

Edit: Ah, apparently to win you have to get it in exactly 6 clicks.

------
jokoon
I wish wikipedia was indexed by subject, so that you could download smaller
parts of it for online use.

~~~
igravious
Hmm. For a machine-centric view there's the intriguing DBPedia[0].

One of the 'chunking' methods that Wikipedia uses is categories (you
undoubtedly knew that) and here is the page that deals with that[1].

Indeed, there's entire category on Wikipedia Categorization[2].

There's the Category Tree page, dead useful, here's one for `semiotics' by way
of example[3]

I'd be tickled pink if others could drop more pointers here! Without doubt, as
Wikipedia continues to self-organize it is going reveal structural truths
about the knowledge humanity is creating.

\---

[0] [http://wiki.dbpedia.org/](http://wiki.dbpedia.org/)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Category](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Category)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_categorizat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_categorization)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ACategor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ACategoryTree&target=semiotics&mode=categories&namespaces=)

~~~
emw
The Wikidata taxonomy is basically the successor to Wikipedia's category tree.
It not only irons out language-based differences (e.g. the category tree being
different among Chinese, Spanish, English, etc. Wikipedias), but also captures
the idea of generalization through a more semantically meaningful relation.
This Wikidata concept tree is constructed with "subclass of" (P279) [1], a
property that expresses the proposition "all instances of these items are also
instances of those items". The goal is to have a subsumption hierarchy that
classifies all human knowledge.

There's an RDF/OWL export of the Wikidata taxonomy available at [2] as
wikidata-taxonomy.nt.gz, which can be explored with Semantic Web browsers like
Protege [3].

Another fundamental relation -- "part of" (P361) [4] -- expresses mereological
relationships. For (oversimplified) example: "iris part of eye", "eye part of
head", "head part of body", etc. Both "subclass of" and "part of" are
transitive.

A separate comment of mine in this discussion [5] describes how to traverse
the "subclass of" tree in the Wikidata UI and a third-party tool called
Wikidata Generic Tree. The same principle applies to the "part of" tree. The
latter gets less attention, but is also quite interesting.

\---

1\.
[https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P279](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P279)

2\. [http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-
exports/rdf/index.php?cont...](http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-
exports/rdf/index.php?content=dump_download.php&dump=20151012)

3\. [http://protege.stanford.edu/](http://protege.stanford.edu/)

4\.
[https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P361](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P361)

5\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10448573](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10448573)

~~~
igravious
Superb response. Deeply informative.

I am very excited about the potential knowledge engineering possibilities
opened up by this large structured datasets.

I believe that at the very least we're going to have within a generation a
machine-generated ontology to rival Kant and Aristotle. Then we'll have to
figure out if this tells us more about how we've digitally organized the
knowledge we have or whether it does in fact reveal something about reality
and being.

Besides 'subclass of' and 'part of' are there any other taxonomic ways for
concepts to relate to other concepts? There are parallels here of course with
object-oriented-programming. It's funny, I only within the last year or so
started reading up on mereology[0] but as soon as one starts thinking about
concepts and there relationships one ends up there eventually. 'part of' is
like encapsulation. 'subclass of' is like inheritance. Is there more?

[0] (from the Greek μερος, ‘part’)
[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mereology/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mereology/)

~~~
emw
Yes, there's also 'instance of' (P31) [1]. Together, 'instance of', 'subclass
of' and 'part of' comprise Wikidata's basic membership properties [2].

'Instance of' and 'subclass of' provide Wikidata with a way to express the
basic philosophical notion of type-token distinction [3]. For things that are
a subclass of something like 'material entity', all instances are physical
objects that have a unique location in space and time.

Not all instances are spatiotemporal particulars, though. For example, one
might say "Homo sapiens instance of taxon", where taxon is a metaclass, i.e. a
class in which the instances are classes. (Here 'taxon' would not be a
subclass of 'material entity' \-- i.e. taxa are information artifacts, not
physical objects.) Support for this kind of "punning" via metamodeling is a
major feature of OWL 2 DL [4].

If this sort of thing interests you, definitely take a look into Wikidata [5].
The project will be a sea change for several key features in Wikipedia (e.g.
infoboxes), and will likely be a main hub of the Semantic Web.

\---

1\.
[https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P31](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P31)

2\.
[https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Basic_membership_properti...](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Basic_membership_properties)

3\. [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/types-
tokens/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/types-tokens/)

4\. [http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-primer/](http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-primer/)

5\. [https://www.wikidata.org](https://www.wikidata.org)

~~~
igravious
Fantastic, I've read through your entire comment history :)

I'm familiar with OWL and RDF. I've been using Sparql and DBPedia, I'll switch
to Sparql and Wikidata if you think that's the way to go. How do you see the
overlap between DBPedia and Wikidata?

I'm concerned that there's going to be knowledge-grab by corporations and
(perhaps) government entities. I fear that the knowledge graphs inside the big
G and FB and Yandex and Apple and MS and so on to power their search engines
and personal assistants will be orders of magnitude more sophisticated and
complex and comprehensive that what will be available to open access research.
Witness Freebase. Are my fears misplaced would you say?

I've read that SEP article, I've also read a good bit of Peirce's original
journal article. As it says in SEP "It should be mentioned that for Peirce
there is actually a trichotomy among types, tokens and tones,[...]" \- I think
it's amusing that basically everybody ignores the triadic distinction that
Peirce claimed to be the case for a dualistic type/term distinction.

I'm looking forward to going through your tutorial quill in hand and pot of
ink at the ready.

~~~
emw
I think SPARQL and Wikidata are the way to go.

Regarding Wikidata and DBpedia: to my understanding the latter gets much of
its content by scraping Wikipedia infoboxes. Wikidata will increasingly
provide data for those infoboxes, and thus DBpedia.

Regarding your fears: I don't share them. Wikidata will greatly enhance the
accessibility of knowledge for open access research.

------
joe5150
Choosing the first link is more or less arbitrary for the purposes of this
test. Knowing as we do that nearly all articles lead to Philosophy, I'd be
interested in knowing the minimum and maximum distances to Philosophy via
traversal of _all_ links in an article.

I feel like this may tell us something interesting about the relative
"distance" from philosophy a given subject has, but it's also just as likely
to not tell us anything.

------
FuuBar
It would be interesting to repeat the analysis for other languages. Do other
languages have other attractors? Trying it for Spanish, I seem to get stuck in
short loop more often, or in Psicología. I got to Filosofía once, but even
that takes me to Psicología. Psicología links you back to itself: Psicología
-> Profesión -> Especialización -> Actividad -> Psicología loop.

------
c3534l
Huh. I woulda thought wikipedia links would lead you to "Hitler" more often
than not.

~~~
teej
The fact that it's the first link is important. The articles reasoning makes
sense.

------
amelius
This seems like a very "fragile" fact. Anyone aware of this could easily break
it.

~~~
tgb
On the contrary, it's a tautology. There are only a finite number of articles,
so either your chain reaches philosophy, it ends because there are no
links/broken links, or it gets stuck in a loop. The other possibility is that
it never ends but never reaches philosophy, but that means it must loop since
there are only finite number of articles.

The interesting thing is two fold: most articles end up in the philosophy
case, and the loops that do exist tend to be small.

