Related papers: The relevance of ontological commitments
The terms 'semantics' and 'ontology' are increasingly appearing together with 'explanation', not only in the scientific literature, but also in organizational communication. However, all of these terms are also being significantly…
The construction of an ontology of scientific knowledge objects, presented here, is part of the development of an approach oriented towards the visualization of scientific knowledge. It is motivated by the fact that the concepts that are…
Philosophers frequently struggle with the relation of metaphysics to the everyday world, with its practical value, and with its relation to empirical science. This paper distinguishes several different models of the relation between…
Dualities in physics have challenged traditional forms of scientific realism by undermining the idea that theories describe a unique underlying ontology. In this paper, we develop a new perspective on scientific realism that responds to…
Ontologies enable knowledge sharing and interdisciplinary collaboration by providing standardized, structured vocabularies for diverse communities. While logical axioms are a cornerstone of ontology design, natural language elements such as…
The traditional concept of knowledge is a justified true belief. The bulk of contemporary epistemology has focused primarily on that task of justification. Truth seems to be a quite obvious criterion-does the belief in question correspond…
G\"odel's Incompleteness Theorems suggest that no single formal system can capture the entirety of one's mathematical beliefs, while pointing at a hierarchy of systems of increasing logical strength that make progressively more explicit…
In this paper, epistemology and ontology of quantum states are discussed based on a completely new way of founding quantum theory. The fundamental notions are conceptual variables in the mind of an observer or in the joint minds of a group…
Human knowledge is made up of the conceptual structures of many communities of interest. In order to establish coherence in human knowledge representation, it is important to enable communication between the conceptual structures of…
Although hypothesis tests play a prominent role in Science, their interpretation can be challenging. Three issues are (i) the difficulty in making an assertive decision based on the output of an hypothesis test, (ii) the logical…
We rely on the strength of linguistic and philosophical perspectives in constructing a framework that offers a unified explanation for presuppositions and existential commitment. We use a rich ontology and a set of methodological principles…
We present some arguments for the thesis that a set-theoretic inspired faith, in the ability of intuitive truth to faithfully reflect relationships between elements of a Platonic universe, may be as misplaced as an assumption that such…
It has often been argued that people can attribute mental states to robots without making any ontological commitments to the reality of those states. But what does it mean to 'attribute' a mental state to a robot, and what is an…
A physical theory consists of the mathematical formalism and an interpretation, which contains the definition of symbols, measurement assignments, concepts and principles, and an ontology. We present a scheme to classify these different…
I argue that, contrary to the standard view, one cannot understand the structure and nature of our knowledge in physics without an analysis of the way that observers (and, more generally, measuring instruments and experimental arrangements)…
Most definitions of ontology, viewed as a "specification of a conceptualization", agree on the fact that if an ontology can take different forms, it necessarily includes a vocabulary of terms and some specification of their meaning in…
The question whether an ontology can safely be replaced by another, possibly simpler, one is fundamental for many ontology engineering and maintenance tasks. It underpins, for example, ontology versioning, ontology modularization,…
In the knowledge engineering community "ontology" is usually defined in the tradition of Gruber as an "explicit specification of a conceptualization". Several variations of this definition exist. In the paper we argue that (with one notable…
AI applications across classification, fairness, and human interaction often implicitly require ontologies of social concepts. Constructing these well, especially when there are many relevant categories, is a controversial task but is…
Our understanding about things is conceptual. By stating that we reason about objects, it is in fact not the objects but concepts referring to them that we manipulate. Now, so long just as we acknowledge infinitely extending notions such as…