Pawel Garbacz

John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin · Faculty of Philosophy

The notion of identity criteria marked the dawn of contemporary formal ontology. Despite a number of issues this notion has raised, the quest for them still seems to be worthwhile, in particular in the case of a formal ontology built in the context of information systems. In the current paper I investigate the benefits and costs of using automatic...

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 o...

Collaborative development of a shared or standardized ontology presents unique issues in workflow, version control, testing, and quality control. These challenges are similar to challenges faced in large-scale collaborative software development. We have taken this idea as the basis of a collaborative ontology development platform based on familiar...

The paper discusses the problem of diachronic criteria of identity for historic localities. We argue that such criteria are needed not just for the sake of ontological clarity but also are indispensable for database management and maintenance. Our survey of the current research in database management and engineering ontology literature found no sat...

The paper outlines a conceptual framework to identify all ontological and logical aspects relevant for the debate over structural universals. The framework allows for a multi-facetted classifications of various accounts of the latter and facilitates their comparison in a systematic way. To show the framework in action I use it to classify all major...

Within the context of the debate between ontological monists and pluralists the paper discusses a number of argumentative strategies that the latter can apply to answer the “there can be only one” argument. I show here that the reply to this argument suggested by J. Turner has its disadvantages and suggest a number of adjustments thereof. In partic...

The paper provides a tentative formulation of the diachronic identity criteria for localities based on a set of paradigmatic case studies of changes they may undergo.

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...

The topic of this paper are the so-called tensed relations, i.e., those relations that hold between objects with respect to time. As tensed relations are not, almost by definition, binary relations, they need a special treatment in the case of such formal languages as OWL where only binary relations are explicitly expressible. We study in this pape...

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.

The paper presents a logical framework formalising the main insights of the psychological theory of concepts developed by Lawrence Barsalou. The framework is established within the context of Common Logic as a logical theory in the axiomatic manner. Its semantic characterisation is provided and shown to be sound and incomplete with respect to the c...

The paper develops an idea of an engineering ontology whose purpose is to represent philosophy as a research discipline in the humanities. I discuss three recent attempts in this respect with the aim to identify their modelling potential. The upshot of this analysis leads to a new conceptual framework for ontological engineering for philosophy. I s...

The paper presents a case study of digitalisation of formal philosophy. Using the theorem provers available at www.cs.miami.edu/~tptp/cgi-bin/SystemOnTPTP, I show that the formal ontology presented in (Niezna?ski 2007) is inconsistent. I also discuss some ways to avoid this inconsistency.

The paper develops an idea of an engineering ontology whose purpose is to represent philosophy as a research discipline in the humanities. I discuss a three recent attempts in this respect with the aim to identify their modelling potential. The upshot of this analysis leads to a new conceptual framework for ontological engineering for philosophy. I...

This paper develops a new perspective on the relation of instantiation. This new perspective is based on recent research in cognitive psychology, or, more specifically, on the theory of frames, which was defined by Lawrence Barsalou to capture the common features of contemporary models of human concepts. I show how this new perspective may be appli...

I develop in this paper a conception of artefacts based on L. Wittgenstein's idea of family resemblance. My approach peruses the notion of frame, which was invented in cognitive psychology as an operationisable extension of this philosophical idea. Following the metaphor of life-cycle I show how this schematic notion of frame may be filled with the...

The paper defines a schema in which to describe the cornucopia applied ontologies. In contradistinction to the main trend in engineering meta-ontology the main ideas that support this schema are inspired by philosophy. Namely, we look at the domain of applied ontologies from the point of view of a certain metaphilosophical tradition. In a nutshell,...

The paper relates the basic ontological categories defined by Roman Ingarden to an engineering model of function known by the name of Functional Basis. The intended aim of this exercise in applied philosophy is to make this model more consistent and outline some possible extensions thereof. KeywordsFunction–Artefact–Ontology

The paper presents a formalisation of one of the leading ontologies in Knowledge Management by the name of Formal Knowledge Management Ontology. After elaborating why the latter ontology is not a formal ontology in the sense of logic and how it might benefit from being logic-based, we detail a logical theory Formalised Formal Knowledge Management O...

The paper presents a formalisation of one of the leading ontologies in Knowledge Management by the name of Formal Knowledge Management On-tology. After elaborating why the latter ontology is not a formal ontology in the sense of logic and how it might benefit from being logic-based we detail a logical theory F 2 KMO that incorporates its main ideas...

The paper defines three logical criteria for semantic adequacy of an applied ontology. All criteria are based on the idea to the effect that when an ontology construed as a formal theory allows for swapping some items in its vocabulary, then it does not sufficiently differentiate between the meanings of these items and, consequently, the semantic a...

In this paper, we give formalisations of two engineering concepts of technical function and present in more general terms the project of supporting functional description translation by ontological analysis. The formalisations are given within the foundational dolce ontology and the concepts formalised are as follows: (1) the function as defined in...

This paper presents a formalization of the notion of function as operation on flows as advanced in the Functional Basis approach of Stone and Wood. We first analyze the modeling of functions in this approach and identify the notions that are ontological significant for their formalization within the foundational ontology DOLCE. Then, we build the l...

The aim of the paper is to apply the software tool Perseus to modelling epistemic interactions. We focus on the issue of agents’ knowledge acquisition, using a logical puzzle in which agents increase their knowledge about the hats they wear. In the paper, first we present a model of epistemic interactions, which allows us to resolve the hats puzzle...

In this paper we disambiguate the design stance as proposed by Daniel C. Dennett, focusing on its application to technical artefacts. Analysing Dennett's work and developing his approach towards interpreting entities, we show that there are two ways of spelling out the design stance, one that presuppose also adopting Dennett's intentional stance fo...

In this paper we argue that the challenge of the formalization of functions not merely consists of analyzing and formalizing yet another concept; the challenge may also consist of formalizing a concept that is to be taken as a family resemblance concept in the Wittgensteinian sense. We focus on engineering for giving this argument and indicate brie...

In this paper three perspectives are presented on defining the general notion of technical artifacts in formal ontologies. These perspectives share two intuitions: that technical artifacts are objects that exist by human intervention; and that technical artifacts are to be contrasted to natural entities. Yet the perspectives are different in the wa...

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.

In common with many other government defence departments, the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) has realised that it has a plethora of legacy systems that were procured as domain specific with little emphasis given to integration requirements. In particular, it realised that the lack of integration between a significant number of the legacy air defence...

Pawel Garbacz, Problem of Artefacts's Existence. A Discussion Note In this paper I discuss the arguments against the existence of artefacts, which were propounded by Mariusz Grygianiec in his book Identycznasc 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...

The aim of the paper is to apply the software tool Perseus to modelling of epistemic interactions. We focus on the issue of agents' knowledge acquisition, using a logical puzzle in which agents increase their knowledge about hats they wear. In the paper, first we present a model of epistemic interactions, which allows to resolve the hats puzzle. Th...

The paper presents preliminary results in the area of ontological engi- neering for historical research. Historical information systems are still in the initial stage of development. Our experience hitherto shows that the decisive stage in the development of such systems is a conceptual model and ontological engineering seems to be the right tool t...

Functional descriptions in the engineering sciences have been analyzed in philosophy. The focus of these analyses has been on determining what is meant when an individual technical object or process is ascribed a function. Functional descriptions in the engineering sciences are, however, much richer than individual ascriptions of functions. Design...

In the paper we present a dynamic model of knowledge. The model is inspired by public announcement logic and an approach to a puzzle concerning knowledge and communication using that logic. The model, using notions of situation and epistemic state as foundations, generalizes structures usually used as a semantics for epistemic logics in static and...

In this paper we present a formal characterization of the engineering concepts of behavior and function of technical artifacts. We capture the meanings that engineers attach to these concepts by formalizing, within the formal ontology DOLCE, the five meanings of artifact behavior and the two meanings of function that Chandrasekaran and Josephson id...

The conceptual world of AI is inhabited by a number of epistemic puzzles whose role is to provide a test harness environment for various methods and algorithms. In our paper we focus on those puzzles in which agents either collaborate or compete with one another in order to adopt their epistemological situations to their environment. Our goal is to...

The paper presents the preliminary version of Ontobella - a domain ontology of beliefs. The philosophical assumptions of this system are taken from the philosophy of Roman Ingarden and from the psychological results obtained in the Lvov-Warsaw school. Ontobella is applied as the conceptual framework for a computer system that collects information a...

The paper contains a first order formal theory pertaining to artefact designs, designs which are construed as the results of designing activities. The theory is based on a minimal ontology of states of affairs and it is inspired by the ideas of the Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden. After differentiating the philosophical notion of design from the...

This paper contains a formal theory of functional parthood. Since the relation of functional parthood is defined here by means of the notion of design, the theory of functional parthood turns out to be a theory of design. The formal theory of design I defend here is a result of introducing a number of constraints that are to express the rational as...

Trudno jest znaleźć bardziej uderzający kontrast niż ten, który zachodzi pomiędzy postawą poznawczą inżyniera a postawą filozofa. Nawet jeżeli zajmujemy się etyką środowiska a nasz kolega inżynier bada teoretyczne podstawy kształtowania krajobrazu, to pomiędzy naszymi a jego metodami i celami badawczymi rozpościera się przepaść, wyznaczona przez op...

The aim of this paper is to specify the ontological commitments of the theory of document genres proposed by J. Yates and W. Orlikowski. To this end, I construct a formal ontology of documents and genres in which to define the notions presupposed in the genre discourse. For the sake of decreasing ambiguity and confusion, I briefly describe the prim...

The aim of this paper is to provide a logically accurate and technologically sound taxonomy of artifact functions. To this end, I review one of the recent proposals of such taxonomy: the Reconciled Functional Basis. Since it turns out that this taxonomy involves some serious shortcomings, I attempt to refine it with the help of the conceptual frame...

The term ‘behavior’ is used ubiquitously in engineering. It refers roughly to the way technical artifacts ‘behave’ in a given or hypothetical situation, and plays a pivotal role in specific design methodologies,since it allows connecting descriptions of the physical structure of technical artifacts to descriptions of their technical functions. Howe...

The focus of this paper are actions in which agents employ instruments in order to achieve desired outcomes. I explore the ontological structure of such actions and the semantic features of the sentences by means of which we refer to these actions. The logical framework for this philosophical enterprise is the theory of the so-called stit operator:...

Country-Specific Mortality and Growth Failure in Infancy and Yound Children and Association With Material Stature Use interactive graphics and maps to view and sort country-specific infant and early dhildhood mortality and growth failure data and their association with maternal

This paper is a modification of Nicola Guarino and Christopher Welty's conception of the subsumption relation. Guarino and Welty require that that whether one property may subsume the other should depend on the modal metaproperties of those properties. I argue that the part of their account that concerns the metaproperty ‘carrying a criterion of id...

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...

The aim of this paper is to define the fallacy of begging the question in the formal language of the theory of consequence. Its main assumption claims this fallacy depends not only on the form of an argument but also on its context. On the ground of recent developments in informal logic, the contextual theory of argumentation, suitable for formalis...

In this paper we give formalizations of two engi-neering concepts of technical functions and present in more general terms the project of supporting en-gineering functional reasoning by means of onto-logical analyses. The concepts that we formalize are the concepts of function as defined in the Func-tional Representation approach by Chandrasekaran...