Spreadsheet-based Ontology Maker (ver. 0.1)
Ever wish you could make an ontology right from your spreadsheet? A lot of my ontology drafting work begins with a spreadsheet: a lexicon, a catalog of important concepts or subject-matter expert terms of art, data types, etc. Along the way, I usually either start from a template (I made) or I draft and then normalize the columns as I go. I made some ontology development software that should help out with that. =) See my Tabular Ontology Maker (https://jonathanvajda.github.io/tabular-ontology-maker/). Main features: The Problem(s) I like working in spreadsheets when I draft ontologies, but many tools aren’t conducive to that.…
Divine power for Your Calling (CCB)
June 8, 2025 – Christ Central Buffalo (www.christcentralbuffalo.com) Sermon Text: 2 Peter 1:1-15 [1-2] Simeon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ,To those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ:May grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. [3-11] His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you…
A Words’ Obscurity Is Not a Defect
From Berkeley’s Alciphron, EUPHRANOR-You seem, Alciphron, to think obscurity a defect; but if it should prove to be no defect, there would then be no force in this objection.ALICIPHRON- I grant there would not. EUPH.- Pray tell me, are not speech and stile instrumental to convey thoughts and notions, to beget knowledge, opinion, and assent?ALC.-This is true. EUPH.-And is not the perfection of an instrument to be measured by the use to which it is subservient ?ALC.- It is. EUPH.-What, therefore, is a defect in one instrument, may be none in another. For instance, edged tools are in general designed…
Mission Insite Tutorials
I made some brief tutorials on how to use Mission Insite’s site to use their analytic services. Mission Insite provides reports for regions of interest to help recognize ministry opportunities. This can be a powerful asset for ministry planning, as it can help identify the baseline along many different axes, as one attempts to better align efforts with community needs. These axes include population size, age, ethnic background, family makeup, occupation and educational attainment, perceived spiritual needs, perceived physical needs, and opinion surveys on religion, politics, social and moral issues. For example, if a multi-ethnic church had a strong initiative…
Berkeley on Getting Hung Up on Words
From a New Theory of Vision (1709), section 120: Without even discussing the topic of “these things”, I want to highlight a few claims he makes that are insightful. This is a lesson for the use of natural language and canonical, unambiguous, and theory-laden terms. You need both natural and formal language, and they are not functionally equivalent.
Anxiety and Our Father’s Care (CCB)
June 16, 2024 – Christ Central Buffalo (www.christcentralbuffalo.com) Sermon Text: Matthew 6:25-34 [25-27] “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of…
Restart Wi-Fi adapter by Batch Script
If you’re like me, you have a laptop that for no known reason has the wifi turn off abruptly and won’t turn back on unless you reset it (fastest way was to just use the troubleshooter). It is a new laptop, so it shouldn’t be doing anything like this. Whatever. I wanted to have a faster way to reset it than going into Windows troubleshooter or manually typing commands every time, so I created a batch file (.bat) that runs what the Windows troubleshooter does anyway. But it also looks like no one really posts this simple fix online, or…
God’s Goodness Revealed (CVPC)
February 19, 2023 – Colonial Village Presbyterian Church (www.cvpchurch.org) Sermon Text: Psalm 19 To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David.[v1-6] The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard.Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.In them he has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and, like a strong man, runs its course with…
Making a CCO aligned D-Acts
I mentioned in a prior blog post that it would be good to have D-Acts expanded. I will be posting my OWL and TTL files where I expand CCO’s representation. Here’s the ontology’s tentative GitHub page: https://github.com/jonathanvajda/cco-d-acts
Expanding the representation of Document Acts
What is a document act? It is an intentional act that changes social arrangements by means of a document. A deontic role is a social role that inheres in an agent (an individual, aggregate of individuals, or an organization) that is grounded in the normative expectations of others. Some document acts can only be performed by those who bear the appropriate roles. E.g., a pastor in virtue of bearing the role has the power to pronounce marriage and sign a marriage license.
Book Review: Promise and Prayer
I reviewed the book by Anthony Thiselton (FBA), entitled Promise and Prayer: The Biblical Writings in the Light of Speech-Act Theory (Cascade Books, 2020). My short review for Theological Book Review is available here: https://tbronline.edublogs.org/2022/09/14/thiselton-promise-and-prayer/ Overall, I enjoyed the book, by the way.
Fallacious and non-fallacious Whataboutism
In my view, many so-called ‘fallacies’ have rational counterparts. A fallacy is just a counterfeit for sound or cogent reasoning. It looks like good reasoning, but it is off in a subtle way. It is because there is a legitimate form of reasoning adjacent to the fallacy, which explains why the fallacy is so appealing. Someone asked on Reddit “Is whataboutism always fallacious?” Here’s my reply: Bringing up someone else’s lack of consistency across cases is not fallacious in and of itself. It’s basically an appeal to say “Show me your principles, so I can understand you” and follow-up “But…
The Method to Science, Book 1 now available
I have now made the entire text The Method to Science, Book I, available online! Rather than continue to make each less available piecemeal, which I can do later (it is rather tedious to reformat and tailor everything to HTML), the entire text is now available as a PDF. It can be downloaded here: https://jonathanvajda.com/the-method-to-science/ I intend to create the next layer (updating spelling, such as ‘meerly’ -> ‘merely’, ‘compleat’ -> ‘complete’) after I finish the remaining books. There is so much to say by way of commentary. Much of what he offers is a fairly clear and straightforward case…
Method to Science, Lessons 2 and 3
I have posted the two most recent lessons from Sergeant’s Method to Science. First, some editing notes, and then some philosophical insights from Lessons II and III worth mentioning. Editing notes. I have changed some conventions a little bit. First off, I am including both Sergeant’s marginal notes and mine in-text with a set-bracket, e.g. “{Sect. 7.}” and “{Latin: ‘secondary substance’}”, respectively. I use these because the normal brackets “[ ]” are used by Sergeant extensively to clarify his own speech or highlight a technical term, so I want to preserve a distinction between Sergeant’s voice and my own, to…
Jonathan M. Vajda 