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Topic: Ontological commitments

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	Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind - ontology (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-08-20)
		An ontological commitment is a commitment to an existence claim.
		In effect, it is a combination of a criterion of ontological commitment and an account of that to which the criterion applies.
		A sentence S is committed to the existence of an entity just in case either (i) there is a name for that entity in the sentence or (ii) the sentence contains, or implies, an existential generalization where that entity is needed to be the value of the bound variable.
	www.artsci.wustl.edu /~philos/MindDict/ontology.html (1914 words)

	What is an Ontology?
		Practically, an ontological commitment is an agreement to use a vocabulary (i.e., ask queries and make assertions) in a way that is consistent (but not complete) with respect to the theory specified by an ontology.
		Ontological commitments are agreements to use the shared vocabulary in a coherent and consistent manner.
		In short, a commitment to a common ontology is a guarantee of consistency, but not completeness, with respect to queries and assertions using the vocabulary defined in the ontology.
	www-ksl.stanford.edu /kst/what-is-an-ontology.html (865 words)

	[No title]
		Intimations of a defensible mereological ontological argument, albeit one whose conclusion is not (obviously) endowed with religious significance.
		In general, then, the problem with ontological arguments is that their conclusion cannot involve expressions with ontological commitment unless those commitments were introduced by expressions used in the premises; they are therefore bound to be question-begging or invlaid.
		For many positive ontological arguments, there are parodies which purport to establish the non-existence of god(s); and for many positive ontological arguments there are lots (usually a large infinity!) of similar arguments which purport to establish the existence of lots (usally a large infinity) of distinct god-like beings.
	isis.hit.bg /ontoarg.htm (2986 words)

	[No title]
		We have ontological slums in the mainstream of philosophic (and non-philosophic) discourse in the form of outlandish ontological commitments.
		From this we may draw the conclusion that such legitimate referral expressions point to ontological commitments as the closest thing to referents possible and that expressions which cannot be converted to a categorical system of bound variables do not.
		Thus is derived an acceptable ontological commitment as opposed to the illusions of one.
	www2.sunysuffolk.edu /schievp/file22d.html (2400 words)

	Prof. Jody Azzouni - Deflating Existential Consequence: A Case for Nominalism
		He also discusses ontological closure conditions, methods in science that characterize limits on what there is. He uses the presence of such conditions to argue for a version of the Eleatic Principle, the claim that, in some sense, everything there is has causal powers.
		Carnap, notoriously, denied that genuine ontological questions (and purported optional answers to these questions) are meaningful, and this viewpoint is one that continues to be a live possibility (or at least a serious temptation) for contemporary philosophers.
		This is even true of Quine's own ontological promptings, his physicalism, for example, which is an ontological position he takes but that cannot—as he admits—be represented by what objectual existential quantifiers range over in the best regimentation of the scientific discourse he accepts.
	evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com /azzouni.htm (2754 words)

	Ontological alternatives etc.
		Ontological commitment with such an abundance of existence-types is certainly not an unequivocal matter.
		Also a great deal of ontological debates centered around questions regarding the distinctness of the significate of the predicate `est', in the sense of actuality, from the significates of other, especially substantial predicates of a thing, that is, the distinction of existence from essence.
		His tactic to reduce ontological commitment is to eliminate "apparently" referring expressions by means of quantified formulae in which the variables may be interpreted as ranging only over "legitimate" entities (in the vein of Russell's analysis of definite descriptions).
	www.fordham.edu /gsas/phil/klima/ONTALT.HTM (10188 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-08-20)
		This ontological commitment is contrasted to various isolations characteristic of contract theory, specifically the modeling strategy of introducing often ad hoc and unexplained constraints that suppress margins and possibilities of entrepreneurial actions that would be open to real-world decision-makers.
		Ontological Commitments in Economic Modeling In the view of Frank Knight (1921) — the founder of the theory of the firm — firm organization, profit, and the entrepreneur are closely related phenomena.
		Conversely, specific isolations may be attacked on both ontological and pragmatic grounds; for example, it may be argued that a specific isolation excludes some ontically essential feature, or that it hasn’t gone sufficiently far for the argument to be put in formal terms.
	it.stlawu.edu /sdae/FossIsolation.doc (9752 words)

	What is a Knowledge Representation?
		The ontologic commitment here is sufficiently obvious and sufficiently important that it is often a subject of debate in the field itself, quite independent of building automated reasoners.
		Commitment to a particular view of the world thus starts with the choice of a representation technology, and accumulates as subsequent choices are made about how to see the world in those terms.
		The phrase "ontological commitment" is perhaps not precisely correct for what we have in mind here, but it is the closest available approximation.
	www.medg.lcs.mit.edu /ftp/psz/k-rep.html (10517 words)

	Towards Principled Core Ontologies (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-08-20)
		The commitments which are implied by the choice of one set of concepts instead of another to describe a certain phenomenon are called ontological commitments.
		Elaborating conceptualizations (and thus selecting ontological commitments) is an essential component of the task of representing knowledge, because conceptualizations select which things are relevant to be represented and which are not [Davis et al.
		For example, the ontological commitment to the six categories proposed in the functional ontology of law naturally divides the study and representation of legal knowledge in six parts.
	ksi.cpsc.ucalgary.ca /KAW/KAW96/valente/doc.html (9844 words)

	Semantics and Ontology (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-08-20)
		Ontological commitments have to with the nature of reality were as Epistemological commitments have to with the possible states of knowledge an agent can have using various types of logic.
		FOL commits to the existence to the existence of objects and relations but does not make an ontological commitment about things like categories, time, events, etc, because of the different ways to deal with them.
		The message "John is six feet tall" is an assertion of truth that commits the sender to the fact, whereas the reified statement, "Mary reports that John is six feet tall" defers this commitment to Mary.
	maya.itsc.uah.edu /Ontologies.html (1460 words)

	Ontological commitments
		In other words, an ontological commitment is a decision to adhere to a certain interpretation of a language in a some domain; it is a mechanism to help ensure that a given model written in a given language communicates exactly and only what was intended by the model developer.
		In developing any KBS, some ontological commitments must be made to limit the models possible in the system to only those models intended by the developers of the models and the users of the KBS.
		To this end, the ontological commitments made in the development of DKSL are discussed in this section.
	www.cden.ryerson.ca /~fil/I/Papers/kicIII/node3.html (460 words)

	Developing self-searched curriculum based on epistemic queries (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-08-20)
		It assumes therefore a pre-commitment by a group of individuals to such concepts as object, etc. Necessarily such an ontological commitment is group-based and in the context of hypertexts, this group refers to the developers of hypertexts, who put ontological tags on texts.
		Such an awareness or cognition of definitional or ontological aspects of the possible curricula however, may not often be available to a learner, especially in situations where the learner is novice to the field of enquiry that interests her/him.
		She begins from the ontological beliefs, get connected initially to ontological links, and then commences associating newer contents through feelings that are present in her own metarepresentation.
	ifets.ieee.org /periodical/vol_3_2001/banerjee.html (5593 words)

	Nominalism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-08-20)
		A substantial portion of chapter 3 is dedicated to careful evaluation of Quine's triviality thesis: the claims that "there is" is used in the vernacular to indicate ontological commitment, and that this use is regimented by the first-order existential quantifier.
		Nevertheless, speakers are competent at recognizing when ontological claims are being made (provided, of course, that certain people—e.g., philosophers—avoid being too tricky about it).
		Concluding he turns to the evaluation of the ontological status of various posits in cohesive-body mathematics: Azzouni claims that, for example, despite the presence of spatial and temporal posits in cohesive-body mathematics, such posits are ultrathin, and he also asserts that cohesive-body mathematics is not committed to forces, either.
	www.wordtrade.com /philosophy/nominalism.htm (2652 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-08-20)
		DATE: 97.06.03 ABSTRACT: Formalizing the ontological commitment of a logical language means offering a way to specify the intended meaning of its vocabulary by constraining the set of its models, giving explicit information about the intended nature of the modelling primitives and their a priori relationships.
		"...the notion of ontological commitment should be a semantic one, not a syntactic one." "...an ontological commitment should capture and constrain a set of conceptualizations." The authors imply that contexts must play an important role as structuring mechanisms for various disparate terminologies, each of which may have its own commitments.
		As such, it provides an important link in establishing consistent ontologies by giving rules for the distinction of various kinds of predicates, and furthermore suggests that if the ontological commitments in a logical language are to be justifiable, then some kinds of `properties' naturally become inconsistent with others.
	deed.ryerson.ca /AnnotatedLiterature/guarino-carrara-giaretta (627 words)

	Modelling assumptions as ontological commitments - Quick Topic Document Review
		The commitment to one or the other complementary ontology is not carried through to the results, however - they are valid independent of the approach to generating them and the world view used in that approach.
		If models are constructed in such a way that internal ontological commitments are not exposed in the interface, then models using complementary ontologies can be used in a higher level model without raising difficulties arising from those differing assumptions.
		[1] This definition seems a little inadequate in the light of the preceding discussion, as it fails to highlight that part of the ontological commitment is where in the lattice an entity is taken to reside and rather focusses on what entities are considered to exist at all.
	www.quicktopic.com /15/D/x5b6uD4yYt6cY.html (2048 words)

	Ockham's treatment of the categories is the principal element of his innovative ontological program
		Accordingly, to eliminate unwanted ontological commitment in any of the accidental categories, all Ockham has to do is to show that the abstract terms in that category are connotative, and to show this, all he has to do is to provide a nominal definition of the terms in question.
		However, strictly speaking, all that these considerations can achieve is the elimination of the apparent ontological commitment of the theory of the categories, by removing the critical assumption of the essentiality of abstract terms in the accidental categories.
		Since he was explicitly committed to these distinct entities, he argued either that the alleged absurd conclusion does not follow from positing them, or that the conclusion is not absurd, or that the absurd conclusion follows only because of some contradictory assumption in the objection itself.
	www.fordham.edu /gsas/phil/klima/OCKHAM.HTM (8223 words)

	Ontological Arguments
		Ontological arguments are arguments, for the conclusion that God exists, from premises which are supposed to derive from some source other than observation of the world — e.g., from reason alone.
		Note that this characterisation does not beg the question against the possibility of the construction of a successful ontological argument — i.e., it does not lead immediately to the conclusion that all ontological arguments are question-begging (in virtue of the ontologically committing vocabulary which they employ).
		Positive ontological arguments — i.e., arguments FOR the existence of god(s) — invariably admit of various kinds of parodies, i.e., parallel arguments which seem at least equally acceptable to non-theists, but which establish absurd or contradictory conclusions.
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/ontological-arguments (8614 words)

	Ontological Commitments - an Astronomy Net God & Science Forum Message
		Regardless of what you believe to exist, the point is that you need to ontologically commit to some kind of ontology in order to delineate reality from fantasy.
		The problem is, whatever ontology you commit to (e.g., a chair) requires beliefs that are unproven and unverifiable.
		But, we have to remain committed to our sense of logic since this is all we have to work with at present (or perhaps ever).
	www.astronomy.net /forums/god/messages/28275.shtml?show=top (899 words)

	Ontologies
		The commitments are, in effect, a strong pair of glasses that determine what we can see, bringing some part of the world into sharp focus at the expense of blurring other parts.
		These commitments and their focusing-blurring effect are not an incidental side effect of a representation choice; they are the essence.
		"Ontological Analysis: The word ontology means 'the study of the state of being.' An ontology describes the states of being of a particular set of things.
	www.aaai.org /AITopics/html/ontol.html (2859 words)

	What is Knowledge
		These commitments and their focusing/blurring effect are not an incidental side effect of a representation choice; they are of the essence: a KR is a set of ontological commitments.
		There is significant and unavoidable ontological commitment even at the level of the familiar representation technologies.
		The ontological commitment of a representation thus begins at the level of the representation technologies and accumulates from there.
	www.geocities.com /kashif5095/KRSchemes.htm (4236 words)

	Plural Quantification
		In particular, they claim that these theories are ontologically innocent in the sense that they introduce no new ontological commitments to sets or any other kind of “set-like” entities over and above the individual objects that compose the pluralities in question.
		If plural locutions incur ontological commitments (over and above the uncontroversial commitment to the individual objects which compose the plurality in question), these ontological commitments cannot be the kind of commitments that are incurred by singular first-order quantifiers.
		Unless a differential treatment of object commitments and other kinds of commitments can be justified, the most interesting notion of ontological commitment will be the umbrella notion that covers all the different forms of commitment.
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/plural-quant (8518 words)

	KIF: The sorted extension
		The only ontological commitment made by KIF (which is a straight manifestation of FOL, right?) is that every name has a referent (of the appropriate sort, in the sorted extension) and every quantifier ranges over a nonempty set (of things of the appropriate sort, ditto.).
		There are no ontological commitments which have any kind of 'necessity'; there is, in fact, not even a commitment to 'necessity' being a coherent notion.
		With the usual (Kripke) understanding of necessity, it involves a commitment to the existence of rather large things called possible worlds and relations between them, forming a kind of semiotic cosmos.
	grimpeur.tamu.edu /pipermail/kif/2000-December/000177.html (951 words)

	EMail Msg <9208220159.AA16056@SMI.Stanford.EDU>
		Those commitments do not come from the syntax of the language, but from the predicates cat(x) and mat(y) in PVPC and from the typed variables x:cat and y:mat in SPC.
		However, if you do make some ontological commitments, a sorted or typed language exhibits them very clearly by marking each variable with a type label.
		In PVPC, some predicates specify the ontological commitments and others specify accidental properties, and the syntax doesn't distinguish which is which.
	www-ksl.stanford.edu /email-archives/srkb.messages/133.html (927 words)

	Antimeta: Ontological Commitment (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-08-20)
		Posted by: Edward Buckner at August 12, 2005 05:14 AM Well, just what exactly "ontological commitment" means is somewhat up for debate.
		Basically, ontological commitments are the things that a theory says exists (which is why we tend to read them off the quantifiers).
		"Ontological commitments are the things that a theory says exists (which is why we tend to read them off the quantifiers).
	www.antimeta.org /blog/archives/2005/08/ontological_com.html (1833 words)

	KIF: The sorted extension (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-08-20)
		As I understood it, the claim was that somehow or other a sorted language involves certain ontological commitments that an unsorted language does not.
		I'll not bother arguing again, I'll just assert: The ontological commitments of a sorted language are no greater than those of an unsorted language.
		It follows that the only reasonable basis for resisting the idea of a sorted extension is pragmatic, notably (as a couple of folks have suggested), that it will encourage the development of ontologies that are difficult to share, thus defeating the purpose of the standard.
	grimpeur.tamu.edu /pipermail/kif/2000-December/000168.html (287 words)

	Re: Ontological commitment
		I think you're right that it's frame of reference, but I'm not sure how "philosophical" it is. Going around looking for ontological commitment (or sometimes "ontic commitment") seems to appeal to some more than others.
		Someone's philosophical view- > point might be implicit, or unconscious, but nevertheless, his > or her statements _about_ logical expressions and logic as such > (or mathematics, for that matter) will mirror a way of thinking > that guides these statements.
		> The question of whether logical expressions entail any ontological > commitments is, I think, not to be found hidden inside the workings > of logic and logical expressions, but rather within the metaphysical > frame of reference one holds that gives logic and logical expressions > the necessary interpretation.
	www.philo.at /phlo/199703/msg00225.html (366 words)

	Formalizing Ontological Commitments - Guarino, Carrara, Giaretta (ResearchIndex) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-08-20)
		Abstract: Formalizing the ontological commitment of a logical language means offering a way to specify the intended meaning of its vocabulary by constraining the set of its models, giving explicit information about the intended nature of the modelling primitives and their a priori relationships.
		We present here a formal definition of ontological commitment which aims to capture the very basic ontological assumptions about the intended domain, related to issues such as identity and internal structure.
		In other words, an ontological commitment is a decision to adhere to a certain interpretation of a language in a some domain; it is a...
	citeseer.lcs.mit.edu /guarino94formalizing.html (591 words)

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