Humans are always interested in distinguishing natural and artificial entities although there is no sharp demarcation between the two categories. Surprisingly, things do not improve when the second type of entities is restricted to the arguably more constrained realm of physical technical artifacts. This paper helps to clarify the relationship between natural entities and technical artifacts by developing a conceptual landscape within which to analyze these notions. The framework is developed by studying three definitions of technical artifact which arise from (...) different perspectives. All these perspectives share two intuitions: that technical artifacts are physical objects that exist by human intervention; and that technical artifacts are entities to be contrasted to natural entities. Yet the perspectives are different in the way they spell out these intuitions: the relevant human intervention may range from intentional selection to intentional production; and the contrast between technical artifacts and natural entities may be introduced by a constitution relation or by defining properties that set technical artifacts apart. The three perspectives are compared and their similarities and dissimilarities are explored with the help of ontological analysis. (shrink)

This paper is the first part of an exploration into the logical properties of relative identity. After providing the semantic grounds for various monadic logics of relative identity, I define the minimal system and its nine extensions. It is suggested that despite their purely formal origin at least some of them may contain nontrivial philosophical insights. All logics are axiomatized by means of sound and complete sequent calculi. I show their affinities with existing formalizations.

This note discusses P. Oppenheimer and E. Zalta's ?A Computationally-Discovered Simplification of the Ontological Argument? [this journal, 2011]. I try to explain why the simplification presented there was successful and comment on the technical aspects of the method they applied.

The paper suggests two revisions of K. Bennett's system of slot mereology. The revisions do not touch on the philosophical rationale for this system, but are focused on certain logical deficiencies in her formalisation.

We investigate a speci c model of knowledge and beliefs and their dynamics. The model is inspired by public announcement logic and the approach to puzzles concerning knowledge using that logic. In the model epistemic considerations are based on ontology. The main notion that constitutes a bridge between these two disciplines is the notion of epistemic capacities. Within the model we study scenarios in which agents can receive false announcements and can have incomplete or improper views about other agent's epistemic (...) capacities. Moreover, we try to express the description of problem speci cation using the tools from applied ontology { RDF format for information and the Protege editor. (shrink)

Are identity criteria grounding principles? The recent debate over this issue seems to indicate a definitively negative answer. Recognising various objections to identity criteria as grounds for identity facts, one may wonder whether the former are capable of playing any salient role in ontology. I argue in this paper that they are, provided that one interprets them not as ontological explanations of identity facts but as ontological specifications thereof. I attempt to elaborate this view in terms of the well-establish distinction (...) between determinables and their determinates, where identity criteria are to play the role of the determinates and the relation of identity is to be their determinable. (shrink)

In this paper we are focused on the relation between an Ontology (with the capital "O") qua philosophical discipline and an ontology (with the lowercase "o") qua branch of Computer Science. In our view "Ontology" refers to all philosophical groups or schools which take some position on the reality. The meaning of 'ontology' in the second case is not that easy to grasp because of the variety of artefacts which are called 'ontologies' and many activities - aiming at creating the (...) ontologies - called ontological engineering . In general we could state that an ontology is something what is called "ontology" beyond Philosophy, mostly in the Knowledge Management, Artificial Intelligence, Conceptual Modelling or Ontological Engineering and what refers to an engineering artefact describing certain aspect of reality. So understood ontology is always tied to certain language (preferably a logical one) or more precisely to the set of the sentences of this language. It is said that these sentences constitute an ontology and specify the intended meaning of the terms used in these sentences. The ontologists usually focus on describing their conceptualization of the relevant for them aspects of reality. In their ontologies only these properties of reality are taken into account, which are considered as important for the sake of the application. In this sense ontological engineering may ignore Ontologically essential properties, i.e. the ones important from the purely philosophical perspective. The simplest ontologies are catalogues - the list of terms or numbers denoting certain object, glossaries - containing additionally the definitions of the terms, thesauri - the glossaries in which the hierarchy of the terms appear and taxonomies - in which the primitives are hierarchically structured in order to enabling the properties' inheritance. The most sophisticated ontologies are called formal ontologies and they are logical theories fully axiomatized. Ontologies are also divided on the top-level ontologies concerning very general and mostly abstract entities (e.g. property, agent, time) and the domain ontologies dealing with some small domains (e.g. car's parts). For a better understanding of the wide variety of ontologies we give an example of three ontologies: WordNet (thesaurus-like ontology), Cyc (top-level, formal ontology) and Enterprise Ontology (domain ontology). The Ontology plays an important role in ontological engineering. We notice that the ontological engineers more and more often rely on the philosophical literature looking for the solutions of the ontological problems. It is especially visible in the top-ontologies where many Ontological distinctions have been directly adopted. On the other hand we must sadly stress that philosophers seem to be not interested in the ontological engineering at all. We'd like to introduce ontology to t. (shrink)

Formal Ontology in Information Systems is the flagship conference of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications. Its interdisciplinary research focus lies at the intersection of philosophical ontology, linguistics, logic, cognitive science, and computer science, as well as in the applications of ontological analysis to conceptual modeling, knowledge engineering, knowledge management, information-systems development, library and information science, scientific research, and semantic technologies in general.As in previous years, FOIS 2014 was a nexus of interdisciplinary research and communication. The current proceedings (...) is divided into four main sections, dealing with: foundations; processes, agency and dispositions; methods and tools; and applications. The last of these covers a broad spectrum of areas, including in particular biology and medicine, engineering, and economy. For the first time in its history, the conference hosted a special track: an ontology competition, the aim of which was to encourage authors to make their ontologies publicly available and to allow them to be evaluated according to a set of predetermined criteria. Papers discussing these ontologies can also be found in this volume.The book will be of interest to all those whose work involves the application of ontologies, and who are looking for a current overview of developments in formal ontology. (shrink)

The paper is a comment on the formalization of the antinomy of futura contigentia in the form of a (inconsistent) theory formulated by Marcin Tkaczyk in the language of classical predicate calculus. I argue that some features of the formalization in question are controversial from the viewpoint of formal semantics and ontology, and suggest two ways of removing some of those controversies.

These considerations seek to show whether it is possible to build a formal theory of the state of affairs, which would be sufficiently well founded in philosophy. Our analysis focuses on a case study in the form of the ontology of the state of affairs proposed by Roman Ingarden. The principal part of this analysis is devoted to Ingarden’s exposition. As its result, the author formulates a list of conditions that should be fulfilled by a formal theory, so that it (...) could aspire to be called “Ingarden’s ontology of the state of affairs.”. (shrink)

The paper contains an attempt at formulating the project of logic comprised in Jan Łukasiewicz's article „On determinism” and a construction of a logic which would realise this project. Such a logic consists of three consequence-operations build upon a four-element algebra. The values of the algebra have been defined by means of the following set of sentences: true and true today, true but not true today, false but not false today and false and false today. It turns out that only (...) one of the consequences is different from the classical consequence and all of them are logically two-valued. It is proved moreover, that the assumption that tautologies consists of sentences-forms which are „always” true today, results in the non-existence of such tautologies. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the arguments against the existence of artefacts, which were propounded by Mariusz Grygianiec in his book Identyczność i trwanie. I show that all of these arguments are inconclusive or are in the need of further elaboration. Therefore, I conclude that the the metaphysical thesis to the effect that artefacts do not exist remains unsupported.