Competing Ontologies and Verbal Disputes
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Prolegomena: Journal of Philosophy |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | |
| Field | Philosophy and religion |
| Keywords | Agreement; Alignment; Conflict; Disagreement; Matching; Ontology; Verbal Dispute; Logical Pluralism |
| Description | The notion of ontology originates in philosophy. It has been recently employed in computer science and information technology for representing knowledge. In the first part of the paper, I will argue that there is a significant overlap in these notions of ontology. Utilizing this overlap, I will show in the second part that ontologies can be used for developing a new powerful heuristic method for resolving verbal disputes in philosophy. Verbal disputes can be defined in terms of ontologies: A dispute over two texts P and S is verbal if and only if both of them can be mapped into the same ontology. In the appendix, I shall analyze the dispute over logical pluralism and indicate how my method of resolving verbal disputes can be employed. |