Informally speaking, a truthmaker is something in the world in virtue of which the sentences of a language can be made true. This fundamental philosophical notion plays a central role in applied ontology. In particular, a recent nonorthodox formulation of this notion proposed by the philosopher Josh Parsons, which we labelled weak truthamking, has been shown to be extremely useful in addressing a number of classical problems in the area of Conceptual Modeling. In this paper, after revisiting the classical notion (...) of truthmaking, we conduct an in depth analysis of Parsons’ account of weak truthmaking. By doing that, we expose some difficulties in his original formulation. As the main contribution of this paper, we propose solutions to address these issues which are then integrated in a new precise interpretation of truthmaking that is harmonizable with. (shrink)

Bruce Waller has defended a deductive reconstruction of the kinds of analogical arguments found in ethics, law, and metaphysics. This paper demonstrates the limits of such a reconstruction and argues for an alternative. non-deductive reconstruction. It will be shown that some analogical arguments do not fit Waller's deductive schema, and that such a schema does not allow for an adequate account of the strengths and weaknesses of an analogical argument. The similarities and differences between the account defended herein and the (...) Trudy Govier's account are discussed as well. (shrink)

We present in this paper a novel ontological theory of events whose central tenet is the Aristotelian distinction between the object that changes and the actual subject of change, which is what we call an individual quality. While in the Kimian tradition events are individuated by a triple ⟨ o, P, t ⟩, where o is an object, P a property, and t an interval of time, for us the simplest events are qualitative changes, individuated by a triple ⟨ o, (...) q, t ⟩, where q is an individual quality inhering in o or in one of its parts. Detaching the individuation of events from the property they exemplify results in a fine-grained theory that keeps metaphysics and semantics clearly separate, and lies between the multiplicative and the unitarian approaches. We discuss then the way language refers to events, observing that, in most cases, event descriptions refer to complex, cognitively relevant clusters of co-occurring qualitative changes, which exhibit a synchronic structure depending on the way they are described. Contra Bennett, who famously argued that the semantics of event names ultimately depends on “local context and unprincipled intuitions”, we show how the lexicon provides systematic principles for individuating such clusters and classifying them into kinds. Finally, we address some open challenges in the semantics of locative and manner modifiers. (shrink)

Bruce Waller has defended a deductive reconstruction of the kinds of analogical arguments found in ethics, law, and metaphysics. This paper demonstrates the limits of such a reconstruction and argues for an alternative. non-deductive reconstruction. It will be shown that some analogical arguments do not fit Waller's deductive schema, and that such a schema does not allow for an adequate account of the strengths and weaknesses of an analogical argument. The similarities and differences between the account defended herein and the (...) Trudy Govier's account are discussed as well. (shrink)

In a number of papers, Kit Fine introduced a theory of embodiment which distinguishes between rigid and variable embodiments, and has been successfully applied to clarify the ontological nature of entities whose parts may or may not vary in time. In particular, he has applied this theory to describe a process such as the erosion of a cliff, which would be a variable embodiment whose manifestations are the different states of erosion of the cliff. We find this theory very powerful, (...) and especially appropriate to capture the intuition that the same process may go on at different times. However, its formal principles have been subject to some criticisms, mainly concerning the mereological structure of a variable embodiment. Moreover, since the notion of variable embodiment is very general, simply saying that processes are variable embodiments is not enough to understand their ontological nature. To address these concerns, in this paper we proceed in two phases: first, we propose a revised version of Fine’s original theory adapted to the case of processes, which adopts a classical mereology instead of Fine’s hylomorphic mereology, and a temporalized constitution relation in place of Fine’s function of variable embodiment; second, we go deeper into the ontological nature of processes by revisiting the notions of homogeneity, intentionality, and telicity discussed in the literature, and propose an account based on ontological principles and not on semantic properties of predicates. This allows us to organize processes into a novel taxonomy based exclusively on their unity and individuation principles. (shrink)

A survey of the similarities and differences between BFO and DOLCE, and of the mutual interactions between Nicola Guarino and Barry Smith.

We propose a novel ontological analysis of relations and relationships based on a re-visitation of a classic problem in the practice of knowledge repre- sentation and conceptual modeling, namely relationship reification. Our idea is that a relation holds in virtue of a relationship's existence. Relationships are therefore truthmakers of relations. In this paper we present a general theory or reification and truthmaking, and discuss the interplay between events and rela- tionships, suggesting that relationships are the focus of events, which emerge (...) from the context (the scene) they occur in. (shrink)

‘Particularism’ and ‘generalism’ refer to families of positions in the philosophy of moral reasoning, with the former playing down the importance of principles, rules or standards, and the latter stressing their importance. Part of the debate has taken an empirical turn, and this turn has implications for AI research and the philosophy of cognitive modeling. In this paper, Jonathan Dancy’s approach to particularism (arguably one of the best known and most radical approaches) is questioned both on logical and empirical grounds. (...) Doubts are raised over whether Dancy’s brand of particularism can adequately explain the graded nature of similarity assessments in analogical arguments. Also, simple recurrent neural network models of moral case classification are presented and discussed. This is done to raise concerns about Dancy’s suggestion that neural networks can help us to understand how we could classify situations in a way that is compatible with his particularism. Throughout, the idea of a surveyable standard—one with restricted length and complexity—plays a key role. Analogical arguments are taken to involve multidimensional similarity assessments, and surveyable contributory standards are taken to be attempts to articulate the dimensions of similarity that may exist between cases. This work will be of relevance both to those who have interests in computationally modeling human moral cognition and to those who are interested in how such models may or may not improve our philosophical understanding of such cognition. (shrink)

I argue that a basic similarity analysis of analogical reasoning handles many apparent cases of visual analogy. I consider how the visual and verbal elements interact in analogical cases. Finally, I offer two analyses of visual elements. One analysis is evidential. The visual elements are evidence for their ver-bal counterparts. One is non-evidential: the visual elements link to verbal elements without providing evi-dence for those elements. The result is to make more room for the logical analysis of visual argumentation.

In 2005, IOS Press published the first issue of applied Ontology. At the time, we argued that, at the core of the journal, there was “a desire to understand the nature of reality and how people construe their world”. We declared that ontology was both “fundamental to human thought” and “to translating our thoughts into computational artifacts” (Guarino & Musen,2005). With an editorial board of distinguished scholars representing the fields of computer science, informatics, information science, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and (...) social science, we had the firm belief that applied Ontologywould fulfill an important academic niche, becoming an essential forum for discussion on topics such as ontological analysis, conceptual modeling, and the role of domain models in building and managing information systems. The facts now show that we were correct. (shrink)

Work on analogy has been done from a number of disciplinary perspectives throughout the history of Western thought. This work is a multidisciplinary guide to theorizing about analogy. It contains 1,406 references, primarily to journal articles and monographs, and primarily to English language material. classical through to contemporary sources are included. The work is classified into eight different sections (with a number of subsections). A brief introduction to each section is provided. Keywords and key expressions of importance to research on (...) analogy are discussed in the introductory material. Electronic resources for conducting research on analogy are listed as well. (shrink)

This paper presents the results of training an artificial neural network (ANN) to classify moral situations. The ANN produces a similarity space in the process of solving its classification problem. The state space is subjected to analysis that suggests that holistic approaches to interpreting its functioning are problematic. The idea of a contributory or pro tanto standard, as discussed in debates between moral particularists and generalists, is used to understand the structure of the similarity space generated by the ANN. A (...) spectrum of possibilities for reasons, from atomistic to holistic, is discussed. Reasons are understood as increasing in nonlocality as they move away from atomism. It is argued that contributory standards could be used to understand forms of nonlocality that need not go all the way to holism. It is also argued that contributory standards may help us to understand the kind of similarity at work in analogical reasoning and argument in ethics. Some objections to using state space approaches to similarity are dealt with, as are objections to using empirical and computational work in philosophy. (shrink)

A simple recurrent artificial neural network is used to classify situations as permissible or impermissible. The trained ANN can be understood as having set up a similarity space of cases at the level of its internal or hidden units. An analysis of the network’s internal representations is undertaken using a new visualization technique for state space approaches to understanding similarity. Insights from the literature on moral philosophy pertaining to contributory standards will be used to interpret the state space set up (...) by the ANN as being structured by implicit reasons. The ANN, on its own, is not capable of explicitly representing or offering reasons to itself or others. That said, the low level similarity space set up by the network could be made available to higher order processes that exploit it for case-based reasoning. It is argued that for normative purposes, similarity could be seen as a contributor to procedural coherence in case-based reasoning and local forms of substantive coherence, but not to global forms of coherence given the computational complexity of managing those more ambitious forms of coherence. (shrink)

In a world that is overflowing with journals and other outlets for scientific publication, the appearance of any new periodical requires some justification. There are already more journals than we can read and more conferences than we can attend. In the case of applied Ontology, we believe that the creation of anew journal not only is completely justifiable, it is downright exciting. For too long, workers in computer science have assumed that content comes for free. “Theory” in computer science has (...) always meant the theory of processes and of computation. We measure the complexity of computer programs in terms of how long it takes machines to execute them, not in terms of how long it takes people to understand and to represent the data on which those programs might operate. We typically describe computer code in terms of algorithms that operate on formal parameters, often without pausing to discuss where the data that might satisfy those parameters come from. This journal was founded on the premise that workers in computer science, informatics, and information science are overdue in paying as much attention to contents as they do to algorithms. (shrink)

David Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics yields a quantum potential, Q. In his early work, the effects of Q are understood in causal terms as acting through a real (quantum) field which pushes particles around. In his later work (with Basil Hiley), the causal understanding of Q appears to have been abandoned. The purpose of this paper is to understand how the use of certain metaphors leads Bohm away from a causal treatment of Q, and to evaluate the use of (...) those metaphors. (shrink)

Evaluative contexts can be stressful, but relatively little is known about how different individuals who vary in responses to self-evaluation make emotion regulatory choices to cope in these situations. To address this gap, participants who vary in self-esteem gave an impromptu speech, rated how they perceived they had performed on multiple evaluative dimensions, and subsequently chose between disengaging attention from emotional processing and engaging with emotional processing via changing its meaning, while waiting to receive feedback regarding these evaluative dimensions. According (...) to our framework, distraction can offer stronger short-term relief than reappraisal, but, distraction is costly in the long run relative to reappraisal because it does not allow learning from evaluative feedback. We predicted and found that participants with lower self-esteem react defensively to threat of failure by seeking short-term relief via distraction over the long-term benefit of reappraisal, as perceived failure increases. Implications for the understanding of emotion regulation and self-esteem are discussed. (shrink)

David Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics yields a quantum potential, Q. In his early work, the effects of Q are understood in causal terms as acting through a real (quantum) field which pushes particles around. In his later work (with Basil Hiley), the causal understanding of Q appears to have been abandoned. The purpose of this paper is to understand how the use of certain metaphors leads Bohm away from a causal treatment of Q, and to evaluate the use of (...) those metaphors. (shrink)

One of the main challenges for computational legal research is drawing up innovative heuristics to derive actionable knowledge from legal documents. While a large part of the research has been so far devoted to the extraction of purely legal information, less attention has been paid to seeking out in the texts the clues of more complex entities: legally relevant facts whose detection requires to link and interpret, as a unified whole, legal information and results of empirical analyses. This paper presents (...) an ongoing research that points in this direction, trying to devise new ways to support public prosecutors in assessing the dangerousness of individuals and groups under investigation, an activity that precisely relies on the cross-sectional evaluation of legal and empirical data. A knowledge mining strategy will be outlined that lines up, into a single metaheuristic model, information extraction, network-based inference, machine learning and visual analytics. We will focus, in particular, on the integration of graph-based inference and machine learning methods used both to support classification tasks and to explore new forms of man-machine cooperation. Experiments made involving public prosecutors from the Italian Anti-Mafia Investigation Directorate and using data from real investigations have not only shown the potentialities of our approach but also offered an opportunity to reflect on the role we could assign to AI when thinking about the future of legal science and practice. (shrink)

This paper identifies a type of multi-source (case-based) reasoning and differentiates it from other types of analogical reasoning. Work in cognitive science on mental space mapping or conceptual blending is used to better understand this type of reasoning. The type of argument featured herein will be shown to be a kind of source-blended argument. While it possesses some similarities to traditionally conceived analogical arguments, there are important differences as well. The triple contract (a key development in the usury debates of (...) the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) will be shown to make use of source-blended arguments. (shrink)

In general, we know that gesture accompanying spoken instruction can help children learn. The present study was conducted to better understand how gesture can support children’s comprehension of spoken instruction and whether the benefit of teaching though speech and gesture over spoken instruction alone depends on differences in cognitive profile – prior knowledge children have that is related to a to-be-learned concept. To answer this question, we explored the impact of gesture instruction on children’s analogical reasoning ability. Children between the (...) ages of 4 and 11 years solved scene analogy problems before or after speech alone or speech and gesture instruction while their visual attention was monitored. Our behavioral results suggest a marginal benefit of gesture instruction over speech alone, but only 5-year-old children showed a distinct advantage from speech+gesture instruction when solving the post-instruction trial, suggesting that at this age, children have the cognitive profile in place to utilize the added support of gesture. Furthermore, while speech+gesture instruction facilitated effective visual attention during instruction, directing attention away from featural matches, and towards relational information, was pivotal for younger children’s success post instruction. We consider how these results contribute to the gesture-for-learning literature and consider how the nuanced impact of gesture is informative for educators teaching tasks of analogy in the classroom. (shrink)

In making analogical arguments about actions, is more similarity between the source and target cases always better? No: _all things considered_, more similarity is not always better, even if the similarities are all relevant. The reason is that the context of the argument, including emotional considerations, modulates the selection of the source case to service the goals of the argument. If the goals of the argument include persuasion and even modifying someone’s emotional state, increasing the overall similarity between the source (...) and target may be counterproductive. (shrink)

In "Representations without Rules, Connectionism and the Syntactic Argument'', Kenneth Aizawa argues against the view that connectionist nets can be understood as processing representations without the use of representation-level rules, and he provides a positive characterization of how to interpret connectionist nets as following representation-level rules. He takes Terry Horgan and John Tienson to be the targets of his critique. The present paper marshals functional and methodological considerations, gleaned from the practice of cognitive modelling, to argue against Aizawa's characterization of (...) how connectionist nets may be understood as making use of representation-level rules. (shrink)

Ontology as a branch of philosophy is the science of what is, of the kinds and structures of objects, properties, events, processes and relations in every area of reality. ‘Ontology’ is often used by philosophers as a synonym for ‘metaphysics’ (literally: ‘what comes after the Physics’), a term which was used by early students of Aristotle to refer to what Aristotle himself called ‘first philosophy’. The term ‘ontology’ (or ontologia) was itself coined in 1613, independently, by two philosophers, Rudolf Göckel (...) (Goclenius), in his Lexicon philosophicum and Jacob Lorhard (Lorhardus), in his Theatrum philosophicum. The first occurrence in English recorded by the OED appears in Bailey’s dictionary of 1721, which defines ontology as ‘an Account of being in the Abstract’. (shrink)

Reification is a standard technique in conceptual modeling, which consists of including in the domain of discourse entities that may otherwise be hidden or implicit. However, deciding what should be rei- fied is not always easy. Recent work on formal ontology offers us a simple answer: put in the domain of discourse those entities that are responsible for the (alleged) truth of our propositions. These are called truthmakers. Re-visiting previous work, we propose in this paper a systematic analysis of truthmaking (...) patterns for properties and relations based on the ontolog- ical nature of their truthmakers. Truthmaking patterns will be presented as generalization of reification patterns, accounting for the fact that, in some cases, we do not reify a property or a relationship directly, but we rather reify its truthmakers. (shrink)

El problema de la relación causal entre el cuerpo y la mente parece merecer, por su importancia y el tiempo a él dedicado, un capítulo aparte en la teoría del conocimiento, en la filosofía de la mente y en las ciencias cognitivas. El dualismo cuerpo-mente dificulta enormemente la explicación teórica de un nexo causal entre uno y otro, problema central en la filosofía de Descartes, más fácilmente rastreable en autores anteriores como san Agustín o Platón. En el presente trabajo analizaremos (...) el desarrollo efectuado por John Searle con el fin de superar este problema mediante una reformulación teórica de los conceptos involucrados en su descripción y conceptuación. Su tratamiento se basa en el reemplazo del concepto tradicional de causalidad por uno más complejo, mediante la introducción teórica de diferentes niveles de observación y del concepto de realización, integrante de este nuevo concepto de causalidad. (shrink)

Terence Horgan and John Tienson claim that folk psychological laws are different in kind from basic physical laws in at least two ways: first, physical laws do not possess the kind of ceteris paribus qualifications possessed by folk psychological laws, which means the two types of laws have different logical forms; and second, applied physical laws are best thought of as being about an idealized world and folk psychological laws about the actual world. I argue that Horgan and Tienson have (...) not made a persuasive case for either of the preceding views. (shrink)

In making analogical arguments about actions, is more similarity between the source and target cases always better? No: all things considered, more similarity is not always better, even if the similarities are all relevant. The reason is that the context of the argument, including emotional considerations, modulates the selection of the source case to service the goals of the argument. If the goals of the argument include persuasion and even modifying someone’s emotional state, increasing the overall similarity between the source (...) and target may be counterproductive. (shrink)

Theories of moral, and more generally, practical reasoning sometimes draw on the notion of coherence. Admirably, Paul Thagard has attempted to give a computationally detailed account of the kind of coherence involved in practical reasoning, claiming that it will help overcome problems in foundationalist approaches to ethics. The arguments herein rebut the alleged role of coherence in practical reasoning endorsed by Thagard. While there are some general lessons to be learned from the preceding, no attempt is made to argue against (...) all forms of coherence in all contexts. Nor is the usefulness of computational modelling called into question. The point will be that coherence cannot be as useful in understanding moral reasoning as coherentists may think. This result has clear implications for the future of Machine Ethics, a newly emerging subfield of AI. (shrink)