Original scientific paper

Competing Ontologies and Verbal Disputes

Jakub Mácha ; Department of Philosophy, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Abstract

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 argue that there is a significant overlap in these notions of ontology. Utilizing this overlap, I 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 analyze the dispute over logical pluralism and indicate how my method of resolving verbal disputes can be employed.

Keywords

Agreement; alignment; conflict; disagreement; logical pluralism; matching; ontology; verbal dispute

Hrčak ID:

187574

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/187574

Publication date:

15.6.2017.

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