A Note on the Transitivity of Parthood

That parthood is a transitive relation is among the most basic principles of classical mereology. Alas, it is also very controversial. In a recent paper, Ingvar Johansson has put forward a novel diagnosis of the problem, along with a corresponding solution. The diagnosis is on the right track, I argue, but the solution is misleading. And once the pieces are properly put together, we end up with a reinforcement of the standard defense of transitivity on behalf of classical mereology

Universalism Entails Extensionalism

Universalism (also known as Conjunctivism, or Collectivism) is the thesis that mereological composition is unrestricted. More precisely: Any non-empty collection of things has a fusion, i.e., something that has all those things as parts and has no part that is disjoint from each of them. Extensionalism is the thesis that sameness of composition is sufficient for identity. More precisely: No two things have exactly the same proper parts (unless they are atomic, i.e., have no proper parts at all). Clearly these two theses are not equivalent. They are, however, more closely related than one might think. More precisely, the entailment holds as long as it is agreed that the following postulates are constitutive of the meaning of ‘part’: Transitivity: Any part of any part of a thing is itself part of that thing. Supplementation: Whenever a thing has a proper part, it has at least another part that is disjoint from the first

Universalism entails Extensionalism

Universalism (also known as Conjunctivism, or Collectivism) is the thesis that mereological composition is unrestricted. More precisely: Any non-empty collection of things has a fusion, i.e., something that has all those things as parts and has no part that is disjoint from each of them. Extensionalism is the thesis that sameness of composition is sufficient for identity. More precisely: No two things have exactly the same proper parts (unless they are atomic, i.e., have no proper parts at all). Clearly these two theses are not equivalent. They are, however, more closely related than one might think. More precisely, the entailment holds as long as it is agreed that the following postulates are constitutive of the meaning of ‘part’: Transitivity: Any part of any part of a thing is itself part of that thing. Supplementation: Whenever a thing has a proper part, it has at least another part that is disjoint from the first

Ontologie leggere a faccette

In questo articolo ci concentriamo sull’uso delle ontologie per l’organizzazione di oggetti, quali ad esempio foto, libri e pagine Web. Le ontologie leggere sono ontologie con una struttura gerarchica ad albero dove a ciascun nodo è associata un’etichetta in linguaggio naturale. Nelle ontologie leggere a faccette le etichette sono organizzate secondo modelli ben definiti, i quali catturano specifici aspetti della conoscenza, ovvero le faccette. A tal fine, ci basiamo sull’approccio Analitico-Sintetico, una ben radicata metodologia usata con successo per decenni in biblioteconomia, soprattutto in India, per la classificazione di libri. Le ontologie leggere a faccette hanno una struttura ben definita ed, in quanto tali, risultano più facili da creare, condividere tra gli utenti, e più appropriate in applicazioni semantiche, dove cioè viene automaticamente analizzato e sfruttato il significato ontologico dei termini

Nešto negativno o totalnim činjenicama

Armstrong famously argued in favour of introducing totality facts in our ontology. Contrary to fully negative (absence) facts, totality facts yield a theory of “moderate” or “partial” negativity, which allegedly provides an elegant solution to the truthmaking problem of negative claims and, at the same time, avoids postulating (many) first-order absences. Friends of totality facts argue that partial negativity is (i) tolerable vis-à-vis the Eleatic principle qua mark of the real, and (ii) achieves a significant advantage in terms of ontological parsimony. But are totality facts, which are partially negative, really more ontologically acceptable than fully negative facts? In this paper, we argue that, comparatively, the case for totality facts is weaker than commonly assumed and that, ultimately, the answer is negative.Armstrong je poznat po zagovaranju uvođenja totalnih činjenica u našu ontologiju. Suprotno potpuno negativnim činjenicama (odsustvu), totalne činjenice pružaju teoriju ili djelomične negativnosti, koja navodno pruža rješenje za utemeljenja istinitosti negativnih tvrdnji te istovremeno izbjegava postuliranje (mnogih) negativnih (odsustva) tvrdnji prvog reda. Zagovornici totalnih činjenica tvrde da je djelomična negativnost (i) prihvatljiva u odnosu na elejsko načelo kao oznake stvarnog, i (ii) da postiže značajnu prednost u smislu ontološke ekonomičnosti. Međutim, jesu li totalne činjenice, koje su djelomično negativne, zaista ontološki prihvatljivije u odnosu na potpuno negativne činjenice? U ovom radu, usporedno gledano, tvrdimo da je argument za totalne činjenice slabiji nego što se uobičajeno pretpostavlja i da je konačni odgovor negativan

Spatial location and its relevance for terminological inferences in bio-ontologies

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>An adequate and expressive ontological representation of biological organisms and their parts requires formal reasoning mechanisms for their relations of physical aggregation and containment.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We demonstrate that the proposed formalism allows to deal consistently with "role propagation along non-taxonomic hierarchies", a problem which had repeatedly been identified as an intricate reasoning problem in biomedical ontologies.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The proposed approach seems to be suitable for the redesign of compositional hierarchies in (bio)medical terminology systems which are embedded into the framework of the OBO (Open Biological Ontologies) Relation Ontology and are using knowledge representation languages developed by the Semantic Web community.</p

Representing and aligning similar relations: parts and wholes in isiZulu vs English

Ontology-enabled medical information systems are used in Sub-Saharan Africa, which require localisation of Semantic Web technologies, such as ontology verbalisation, yet keeping a link with the English language-based systems. In realising this, we zoom in on the part-whole relations that are ubiquitous in medical ontologies, and the isiZulu language. The analysis of part-whole relations in isiZulu revealed both `underspecification'---therewith also challenging the transitivity claim---and three refinements cf. the list of common part-whole relations. This was first implemented for the monolingual scenario so that it generates structured natural language from an ontology in isiZulu. Two new natural language-independent correspondence patterns are proposed to solve non-1:1 object property alignments, which are subsequently used to align the part-whole taxonomies informed by the two languages

The Extensionality of Parthood and Composition

I focus on three mereological principles: the extensionality of parthood (EP), the uniqueness of composition (UC), and the extensionality of composition (EC). These principles are not equivalent. Nevertheless they are closely related (and often equated), since they all reflect the basic nominalistic dictum ‘No difference without a difference maker'. All of them, individually or collectively, have been challenged on philosophical grounds. In the first part I argue that such challenges do not quite threaten (EP), because they are either self‐defeating or unsupported. In the second part I argue that they do little to undermine the tenability of (UC) and (EC) either

Object-Oriented Ontology and Materialism

According to Object-Oriented Ontology, matter does not exist. Here I will challenge that idea, by advancing some arguments that aim to establish that mat-ter can be conceptualized both as a sensual object as well as a real object. I will also argue that matter is not fictional, and that the word “matter” can be under-stood as a term that is grammatically singular but referentially plural. This being so, matter itself is a plurality of things, each of which has some kind and quantity of energy