I’d like to offer a general observation about ontology. As far as I can tell the concept enter computer science through Old School work in symbolic computation in AI. So you want to build a system that can represent all of human knowledge? OK. What are the primitive elements of such a system? What objects, events, and processes, along with the relations between them, what do you need? That’s your ontology. From you generalize to any computing system: what are the primitives and what can you construct from them?
If you want to take a peak at the Old School literature, John Sowa offers one view. Note that this is not a general survey of the literature. It’s one man’s distillation of it. Sowa worked at IBM Research (at Armonk I believe) for years.
I was interested in the problem, and still am, and did a variety of work. One of the things I did was write a short article on the “Ontology of Common Sense” for a Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology which you can find here:
The opening three paragraphs:
The ontology of common sense is the discipline which seeks to establish the categories which are used in everyday life to characterize objects and events. In everyday life steel bars and window panes are solid objects. For the scientist, the glass of the window pane is a liquid, and the solidity of both the window pane and the steel bar is illusory, since the space they occupy consists mostly of empty regions between the sub-atomic particles which constitute these objects. These facts, however, have no bearing on the ontological categories of common sense. Sub-atomic particles and solid liquids do not exist in the domain of common sense. Common sense employs different ontological categories from those used in the various specialized disciplines of science.
Similar examples of differences between common sense and scientific ontologies can be multiplied at will. The common sense world recognizes salt, which is defined in terms of its colour, shape, and, above all, taste. But the chemist deals with sodium chloride, a molecule consisting of sodium and chlorine atoms; taste has no existence in this world. To common sense, human beings are ontologically distinct from animals; we have language and reason, animals do not. To the biologist there is no such distinction; human beings are animals; language and reason evolved because they have survival value. Finally, consider the Morning Star and the Evening Star. Only by moving from the domain of common sense to the domain of astronomy can we assert that these stars are not stars at all, but simply different manifestations of the planet Venus.
In all of these cases the common sense world is organized in terms of one set of object categories, predicates, and events while the scientific accounts of the same phenomena are organized by different concepts. In his seminal discussion of natural kinds, Quine suggested that science evolves by replacing a biologically innate quality space, which gives rise to natural kinds (in our terms, the categories of a common sense ontology), with new quality spaces. However, Quine has little to say about just how scientific ontology evolved from common sense ontology.
I suspect that there’s a lot of structure between raw sensory experience and common sense ontology and a lot more between that and the ontologies of various scientific disciplines. But, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if a skilled auto mechanic has their own ontology of cars, a lot of it primarily non-verbal and based on the feels and sounds of working on cars with your hands.
Here’s my references, with brief annotations, which indicate something of the range of relevant work that’s been done in the past:
Berlin, B., Breedlove, D., Raven, P. 1973. “General Principles of Classification and Nomenclature in Folk Biology,” American Anthropologist, 75, 214 − 242. There’s been quite a lot of work on folk taxonomy. In some ways it’s parallel to the (more) formal taxonomies of modern biology. But there are differences as well.
Hayes, P. J. 1985. “The Second Naive Physics Manifesto,” in Formal Theories of the Commonsense World, J. R. Hobbs and R. C. Moore, eds., Ablex Publishing Co., 1 − 36. A lot of work has been done in this area, including work on college students who may have ideas about Newtonian dynamics in their heads but play video games in a more Aristotelian way.
Keil, F. C. 1979. Semantic and Conceptual Development: An Ontological Perspective, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press. How children develop concepts.
Quine, W. V.1969. “Natural Kinds,” in Essays in Honor of Carl G. Hempel, Nicholas Rescher et al., eds., D. Reidel Publishing Co., 5 − 23. That is to say, are there natural kinds or is it culture all the way down.
Rosch, E. et al. 1976. “Basic Objects in Natural Categories,” Cognitive Psychology, 8, 382 − 439. A key text introducing something called prototype theory.
Sommers, F. 1963.”Types and Ontology,” Philosophical Review, 72, 327 − 363. Do you know what philosophers mean by a category mistake? This is about the logic behind them.
I’d like to offer a general observation about ontology. As far as I can tell the concept enter computer science through Old School work in symbolic computation in AI. So you want to build a system that can represent all of human knowledge? OK. What are the primitive elements of such a system? What objects, events, and processes, along with the relations between them, what do you need? That’s your ontology. From you generalize to any computing system: what are the primitives and what can you construct from them?
If you want to take a peak at the Old School literature, John Sowa offers one view. Note that this is not a general survey of the literature. It’s one man’s distillation of it. Sowa worked at IBM Research (at Armonk I believe) for years.
I was interested in the problem, and still am, and did a variety of work. One of the things I did was write a short article on the “Ontology of Common Sense” for a Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology which you can find here:
The opening three paragraphs:
I suspect that there’s a lot of structure between raw sensory experience and common sense ontology and a lot more between that and the ontologies of various scientific disciplines. But, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if a skilled auto mechanic has their own ontology of cars, a lot of it primarily non-verbal and based on the feels and sounds of working on cars with your hands.
Here’s my references, with brief annotations, which indicate something of the range of relevant work that’s been done in the past:
Berlin, B., Breedlove, D., Raven, P. 1973. “General Principles of Classification and Nomenclature in Folk Biology,” American Anthropologist, 75, 214 − 242. There’s been quite a lot of work on folk taxonomy. In some ways it’s parallel to the (more) formal taxonomies of modern biology. But there are differences as well.
Hayes, P. J. 1985. “The Second Naive Physics Manifesto,” in Formal Theories of the Commonsense World, J. R. Hobbs and R. C. Moore, eds., Ablex Publishing Co., 1 − 36. A lot of work has been done in this area, including work on college students who may have ideas about Newtonian dynamics in their heads but play video games in a more Aristotelian way.
Keil, F. C. 1979. Semantic and Conceptual Development: An Ontological Perspective, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press. How children develop concepts.
Quine, W. V.1969. “Natural Kinds,” in Essays in Honor of Carl G. Hempel, Nicholas Rescher et al., eds., D. Reidel Publishing Co., 5 − 23. That is to say, are there natural kinds or is it culture all the way down.
Rosch, E. et al. 1976. “Basic Objects in Natural Categories,” Cognitive Psychology, 8, 382 − 439. A key text introducing something called prototype theory.
Sommers, F. 1963.”Types and Ontology,” Philosophical Review, 72, 327 − 363. Do you know what philosophers mean by a category mistake? This is about the logic behind them.