... Journals

See http://www.doaj.org.

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... Humanities

http://www.mpg.de/pdf/openaccess/BerlinDeclaration_en.pdf

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... journals

http://www.doaj.org

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... qua

Qua means here ``respectively'' or ``with regard to the aspect of''.

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... GOL

General Ontological Language

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... Ontologies

We use plural, here, because the GOL group develops a set of ontologies with branch points, so that different philosophical views can be accommodated.

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... law

In fact, before this law has been put in place 1516, some fatal accidents with beer brewed using daturia plants have occurred, and we do not want to take this risk.

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... (ZFC

The axiom system of Zermelo-Frankel with the axiom of choice.

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... KR

KR stands for Knowledge Representation.

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... process

Remember that a process can have different participants in its different stages.

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... equivalent

They are equivalent in the sense that in each theory the other is interpretable.

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... part-of

More on this relation can be found in section 5.2.9.

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... work

If we need more features of relations, we will introduce them when we need them. Some of our views on relations will differ from the views in GOL as expressed in (Heller et al., 2004a), but we will only mention this difference explicitly when we believe that it is of severe impact.

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... beer''

Obviously, the state of affairs is not this sentence, but a real event. As it is very hard to include real events in a thesis of this kind, we denote events like this with phrases of the above kind.

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... beer

Please regard this possible state of affairs as purely hypothetical. Robert is indeed drinking beer on a more or less regular basis.

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... affairs?

We have to acknowledge here, that our choice of words is highly prejudiced.

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... non-rabbit

It may be possible to say, that a non-rabbit is anything, that is not a rabbit. Therefore, it is the set containing all entities except rabbits. A non-rabbit would then be an entity, that is contained in this set. However, at the moment we are concerned with an investigation of ontological categories, and not abstract, set-theoretical models for rabbits, non-rabbits or entities in general. The set $NonRabbit$ does have an extension in reality, but we do not believe it to be a category of existence. States of affairs are not extensional entities. To illustrate this, imagine being asked by a child ``What is this thing?'', while the child is pointing towards some strange building. Then, usually, your answer will not be ``This is a non-rabbit.'' or ``This is not a rabbit.'' but rather a remark about what this building really is (perhaps in terms of a concept).

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... related

This does not mean, that there may be no axioms relating these relations. We could state that whenever some entity is $non-having$ some property, it is $lacking$ this property.

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... table

The reason we cannot account for any beliefs is the following: In the example, Kay is believing something, let us call it $x$. This entity $x$ is a creation of Kay's mind, and this is where $x$ exists. Let us call the state of affairs ``the coffee cup's being on the table'' $y$. Constituent parts of $y$ are some relator $r::R$, where $R$ is the relation ``being-on'', the coffee cup and the table. These entities are not present in Kay's mind, and therefore $x \not= y$.

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...#tex2html_wrap_inline8314#

We will soon become more concrete.

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... affairs

Here ``state of affairs'' is translated as ``fact''.

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... world

We have to mention possible worlds here, but do so only briefly. We will argue in favor of their existence later in this thesis, and will introduce them more formally and based on an investigation of situoids. For details, see section 5.2.10.

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...#tex2html_wrap_inline8424#

We use $nil$ here as a keyword designating that the function is not assigned for this argument.

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... world

It could just as well represent the world, with the only difference, that the agent has to be a part the world in this case.

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... affairs

Again, we do not want to state, that a world is the totality of their states of affairs, but only that there are states of affairs existent in a worlds.

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... boundary

This is due to the nature of how concepts are kept in mind. For more detail, see the discussion of the mental stratum in (Heller et al., 2004a).

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... complement

The complement of an infon is a change of polarity.

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... here

Since this is a controversial issue, we will not give an answer at all, but rather leave it open. We will, however, give two alternative axioms, and leave it to the user of our theory to decide which one suits his needs and beliefs.

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... present

We could use ``is part of'' here, but since we have not said what we mean by a part of a situoid yet, we will use this informal notion of ``presence'' in some situoid.

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...#tex2html_wrap_inline8899#

We use the suffix $f$ to show that we use an already introduced relation of GOL as a function.

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... situoid

Note that we are still undecided, whether this can be a situoid at all.

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... world

If it was not possible, then only due to the laws of physics, which are of little concern to philosophers and ontologists.

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... domains

For a more detailed discussion of complexes and isomorphisms between them, see (Rescher and Oppenheim, 1955) or Russel's ``Human Knowledge''.

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... both

Please note, that the result of this projection may be a situoid, but in the general case it is not. We could end up with some empty region of space over a period of time. In the most general sense, the parts of a situoid in this sense are processes.

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... race

Please note, that this statement is valid only with regard to the specific part-of relation which we have used.

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...birdi

The illustration is due to Karen Walzer.

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... totalities

We have to emphasize, that these situoids do not come into existence through our act of comprehension. They do exist independently, with the property of being comprehensible. They would exist even without any subject with the ability of comprehension.

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... up

With the chunks of information possessed and comprehended, we can generalize the information, and therefore move to some higher, more abstract concepts. This is referred to as ``chunking up''. On the other hand, if we already possess high-level information and assigned it an appropriate conceptual meaning, we can particularize these concepts, and move to more concrete, lower-level chunks. This is referred to as ``chunking down''. When chunking down, we could ask question like

• How did this happen?
• Why did this happen?
• What is the root cause of this?
• What specifically is it about?
• What is an instance of this concept?
• What are the parts of this?

When chunking up, we may ask the following questions:

• What does this mean?
• How is this related to...?
• What is this a part of?
• What is this for?

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... plaza

We are aware of the fact that there are plazas without people, trees and fountains, but we suppose $Plaza_U$ is the universal for plazas of this kind.

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... supervenient

Supervenience is a well defined property in philosophy. A group of properties of some higher level, such as the mental stratum, $X$ supervene on the properties of some lower level, such as the physical stratum, $Y$, if and only if the following is true for all objects $a$ and $b$:

• $a$ and $b$ cannot differ in their $X$-group properties without also differing in their $Y$-group properties.
• If $a$ and $b$ have identical $Y$-group properties, then they also have identical $X$-group properties.
• If $a$ and $b$ do not have identical $X$-group properties, then they also do not have identical $Y$-group properties.

Note that if $a$ and $b$ have the same properties on the higher level, $X$, they do not necessarily have to have identical lower level ($Y$) properties

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...#tex2html_wrap_inline10027#

It is assumed here that right boundaries are before ($<$) left boundaries.

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... logic

This is actually a limitation, as there may be universals requiring more powerful formalisms, such as higher order logics.

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... appropriate

``Appropriateness'' is here defined by roles.

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...-theories

$\exists$-theories are theories, where all formulas are of the form $\exists x_1 \exists x_2 \ldots \exists x_n F(x)$, where $F(x)$ is without quantifier.

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...#tex2html_wrap_inline11194#

We take $A \lor B$ as an abbreviation of $\neg (\neg A \land \neg B)$ and $A\rightarrow B$ as an abbreviation of $\neg A \lor B$.

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... situations

For the rest of this section we will use ``situation'' when we mean a situation or a situoid. Barwise subsumed both ontological categories under the term ``situation'', and we will use his terminology in this section. But keep in mind that we are not solely talking about situations, but situoids as well.

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... event

We will write ``event'' for ``situation, situoid, state of affairs or event''.

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...#tex2html_wrap_inline11537#

Therefore, smoking does not cause cancer, and sex does not cause pregnancy.

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... event

This is another logical fallacy, known as ``cum hoc ergo propter hoc'', an argument of false cause.

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