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Toward cognitivist ontologies

On the role of selective attention for upper ontologies

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Abstract

Ontologies play a key role in modern information society although there are still many fundamental questions regarding their structure to be answered. In this paper, some of these are presented, and it is argued that they require a shift from realist to cognitivist ontologies, with ontology design crucially depending on taking both cognitive and linguistic aspects into consideration. A detailed discussion of central parts of a proposed cognitivist upper ontology based on qualitative representations of selective attention is presented.

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Notes

  1. “Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering” (Masolo et al. 2003).

  2. I will be using the term “type” here in the sense of what is called “property” in Masolo et al. (2003).

  3. This scenario is taken from a short story of Polish science fiction author Stanislav Lem (1976), “Do you exist, Mister Johns?”, German version “Gibt es Sie, Mister Johns?” in Nacht und Schimmel, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. There are corresponding classical puzzles in philosophy, e.g., the “ship of theseus” puzzle of Thomas Hobbes cited in Scholl (2007).

  4. Note also that while there seems to be a correspondence of endurants and their expression as nouns, and perdurants and their expression as verbs, there are also nouns expressing perdurants (the last ride, too much riding etc.).

  5. And is, in fact, common practice, cf. e.g., http://www.opencyc.com.

  6. The neglected role of Stuff in Ontology has been discussed in detail in the work of Henry Laycock, e.g., Laycock (1972).

  7. Note also that TemporalStuff can be linguistically expressed, e.g., too much riding can cause severe back pain.

  8. This translates to diese Möbel (’these [!] furniture’) in German.

  9. Suggested Upper Merged Ontology, see http://www.ontologyportal.org.

  10. Personally, I find “cognitive ontology” the better term (as in “Cognitive Science”). However, as it might be misunderstood merely as an ontology of psychological notions, I do not use it.

  11. The illustrating example Kahneman et al. give is the well-known reaction of onlookers watching the approaching superman: “It’s a bird; it’s a plane; it’s Superman!”. They refer to a persistent object, although both perceptual features and attributed types change.

  12. To my knowledge, there is no comparable approach viewing Stuff like this. Usually (cf. e.g., vanMarle and Scholl 2003), Stuff is equated with Amount of stuff ( Amount of matter ), which, being of type Object , is a different thing.

  13. It is important to point out here that the author and the authors cited are aware of the fact that there is no simple word-to-ontological category mapping (cf., e.g., Jackendoff 1996).

  14. Cf. Krifka (1989) for a formal approach on what he calls the relation between nominal reference and temporal constitution.

  15. The corresponding linguistic test here is asking how many / wie viele (aggregate) or how much / wie viel (stuff).

  16. Point instances are also called “semelfactives”.

  17. These features obviously correspond to ±b and ±i.

  18. This corresponds to evidence for micro-scale motion detectors whose input is glued together in a larger-scale motion area.

  19. This is in line with “the idea that time-sensation derives, specifically, from perceiving the changes [\(\ldots\)] entailed by the activity of attention” (Marchetti 2009, p. 33, his emphasis).

  20. This correlates with the distinction of having to represent changes in the world (conceived time) and changes in cognitive processing (processing time) in Langacker (1987). Note that although these aspects can be dissociated, both can cooccur.

  21. The Kleene plus in the following depictions is to be interpreted as ‘one frame or more of type X/Y’.

  22. As mentioned, a FTE entity somehow is a “transitional blob” (or mostly: “temporal blob”) as the middle frame “stands out” wrt. to its surrounding frames.

  23. They are sometimes called “pofective” (Herweg 1991). Note that a bounded process (or state) is neither an accomplishment nor a “punctual” event and hence a gap in standard classifications.

  24. This includes the characteristic motions of movement verbs. Note that one can run/walk on the spot.

  25. Similar, but not identical to, the FINSTs (“fingers of instantiation”) of Pylyshyn (2009), and quite probably at a higher level of representation. Similar, if not identical to, Talmy‘s plexity.

  26. This is corroborated by the observation that one has to use much for the modification of the process verbs used in (3) and (4): much/*many flashing/breathing.

  27. For example, there are at least countable objects (a time), aggregates (many times) and stuff (much time) in the time domain.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. I also thank John Bateman, Peter Bosch, Werner Kuhn and Laure Vieu for helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper.

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    Kai-Uwe Carstensen

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Carstensen, KU. Toward cognitivist ontologies. Cogn Process 12, 379–393 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-011-0405-0

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