The Use of Sets (and Other Extensional Entities) in the Analysis of Hylomorphically Complex Objects

Hylomorphically complex objects are things that change their parts or matter or that might have, or have had, different parts or matter. Often ontologists analyze such objects in terms of sets (or functions, understood set-theoretically) or other extensional entities such as mereological fusions or quantities of matter. I urge two reasons for being wary of any such analyses. First, being extensional, such things as sets are ill-suited to capture the characteristic modal and temporal flexibility of hylomorphically complex objects. Secondly, sets are often appealed to because they seem to contain their members. But the idea that sets do contain their members, in the ordinary sense of containment, is a substantive metaphysical position that makes analyses that rely on that idea for their plausibility much more metaphysically committing than is generally thought

Is mereology empirical? Composition for fermions

How best to think about quantum systems under permutation invariance is a question that has received a great deal of attention in the literature. But very little attention has been paid to taking seriously the proposal that permutation invariance reflects a representational redundancy in the formalism. Under such a proposal, it is far from obvious how a constituent quantum system is represented. Consequently, it is also far from obvious how quantum systems compose to form assemblies, i.e. what is the formal structure of their relations of parthood, overlap and fusion. In this paper, I explore one proposal for the case of fermions and their assemblies. According to this proposal, fermionic assemblies which are not entangled -- in some heterodox, but natural sense of 'entangled' -- provide a prima facie counterexample to classical mereology. This result is puzzling; but, I argue, no more intolerable than any other available interpretative option.Comment: 24 pages, 1 figur

Imperfect identity

Questions of identity over time are often hard to answer. A long tradition has it that such questions are somehow soft: they have no unique, determinate answer, and disagreements about them are merely verbal. I argue that this claim is not the truism it is taken to be. Depending on how it is understood, it turns out either to be false or to presuppose a highly contentious metaphysical claim

Composition and Relative Counting

According to the so-called strong variant of Composition as Identity (CAI), the Principle of Indiscernibility of Identicals can be extended to composition, by resorting to broadly Fregean relativizations of cardinality ascriptions. In this paper we analyze various ways in which this relativization could be achieved. According to one broad variety of relativization, cardinality ascriptions are about objects, while concepts occupy an additional argument place. It should be possible to paraphrase the cardinality ascriptions in plural logic and, as a consequence, relative counting requires the relativization either of quantifiers, or of identity, or of the is one of relation. However, some of these relativizations do not deliver the expected results, and others rely on problematic assumptions. In another broad variety of relativization, cardinality ascriptions are about concepts or sets. The most promising development of this approach is prima facie connected with a violation of the so-called Coreferentiality Constraint, according to which an identity statement is true only if its terms have the same referent. Moreover - even provided that the problem with coreferentiality can be fixed - the resulting analysis of cardinality ascriptions meets several difficulties

Identity

I explore proposals for stating identity criteria in terms of ground. I also address considerations for and against taking identity and distinctness facts to be ungrounded

Developing an ontological sandbox : investigating multi-level modelling’s possible Metaphysical Structures

One of the central concerns of the multi-level modelling (MLM) community is the hierarchy of classifications that appear in conceptual models; what these are, how they are linked and how they should be organised into levels and modelled. Though there has been significant work done in this area, we believe that it could be enhanced by introducing a systematic way to investigate the ontological nature and requirements that underlie the frameworks and tools proposed by the community to support MLM (such as Orthogonal Classification Architecture and Melanee). In this paper, we introduce a key component for the investigation and understanding of the ontological requirements, an ontological sandbox. This is a conceptual framework for investigating and comparing multiple variations of possible ontologies – without having to commit to any of them – isolated from a full commitment to any foundational ontology. We discuss the sandbox framework as well as walking through an example of how it can be used to investigate a simple ontology. The example, despite its simplicity, illustrates how the constructional approach can help to expose and explain the metaphysical structures used in ontologies, and so reveal the underlying nature of MLM levelling

Some Ontological Principles for Designing Upper Level Lexical Resources

The purpose of this paper is to explore some semantic problems related to the use of linguistic ontologies in information systems, and to suggest some organizing principles aimed to solve such problems. The taxonomic structure of current ontologies is unfortunately quite complicated and hard to understand, especially for what concerns the upper levels. I will focus here on the problem of ISA overloading, which I believe is the main responsible of these difficulties. To this purpose, I will carefully analyze the ontological nature of the categories used in current upper-level structures, considering the necessity of splitting them according to more subtle distinctions or the opportunity of excluding them because of their limited organizational role.Comment: 8 pages - gzipped postscript file - A4 forma

The World Is Either Digital or Analogue

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