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82-553: The Cell Ontology is an ontology that aims at capturing the diversity of cell types in animals . It is part of the Open Biomedical and Biological Ontologies (OBO) Foundry . The Cell Ontology identifiers and organizational structure are used to annotate data at the level of cell types, for example in single-cell RNA-seq studies. It is one important resource in the construction of the Human Cell Atlas . The Cell Ontology

164-418: A semantic fact (i.e., the proposition that is represented by "The horse is red"). In other words, a propositional function is like an algorithm. The meaning of "red" in this case is whatever takes the entity "the horse" and turns it into the statement, "The horse is red." Linguists have developed at least two general methods of understanding the relationship between the parts of a linguistic string and how it

246-402: A common upper ontology is a largely manual process and therefore time-consuming and expensive. Domain ontologies that use the same upper ontology to provide a set of basic elements with which to specify the meanings of the domain ontology entities can be merged with less effort. There are studies on generalized techniques for merging ontologies, but this area of research is still ongoing, and it

328-592: A convention exactly is, and how it is studied, and second regards the extent that conventions even matter in the study of language. David Kellogg Lewis proposed a worthy reply to the first question by expounding the view that a convention is a "rationally self-perpetuating regularity in behavior". However, this view seems to compete to some extent with the Gricean view of speaker's meaning, requiring either one (or both) to be weakened if both are to be taken as true. Some have questioned whether or not conventions are relevant to

410-536: A linguistic tool for learning domain ontologies. The Gellish ontology is an example of a combination of an upper and a domain ontology. A survey of ontology visualization methods is presented by Katifori et al. An updated survey of ontology visualization methods and tools was published by Dudás et al. The most established ontology visualization methods, namely indented tree and graph visualization are evaluated by Fu et al. A visual language for ontologies represented in OWL

492-502: A preface to the proceedings. Some researchers, drawing inspiration from philosophical ontologies, viewed computational ontology as a kind of applied philosophy. In 1993, the widely cited web page and paper "Toward Principles for the Design of Ontologies Used for Knowledge Sharing" by Tom Gruber used ontology as a technical term in computer science closely related to earlier idea of semantic networks and taxonomies . Gruber introduced

574-419: A range of correctness. He also argued that primitive names had a natural correctness, because each phoneme represented basic ideas or sentiments. For example, for Plato the letter l and its sound represented the idea of softness. However, by the end of Cratylus , he had admitted that some social conventions were also involved, and that there were faults in the idea that phonemes had individual meanings. Plato

656-415: A range of fields, including biomedical informatics, industry. Such efforts often use ontology editing tools such as Protégé . Ontology is a branch of philosophy and intersects areas such as metaphysics , epistemology , and philosophy of language , as it considers how knowledge, language, and perception relate to the nature of reality. Metaphysics deals with questions like "what exists?" and "what

738-407: A real commonality of form, he is more often considered a proponent of moderate realism . The Stoics made important contributions to the analysis of grammar, distinguishing five parts of speech: nouns, verbs, appellatives (names or epithets ), conjunctions and articles . They also developed a sophisticated doctrine of the lektón associated with each sign of a language, but distinct from both

820-551: A realm of the world, such as biology or politics. Each domain ontology typically models domain-specific definitions of terms. For example, the word card has many different meanings. An ontology about the domain of poker would model the " playing card " meaning of the word, while an ontology about the domain of computer hardware would model the " punched card " and " video card " meanings. Since domain ontologies are written by different people, they represent concepts in very specific and unique ways, and are often incompatible within

902-522: A referent. Such a "mediated reference" view has certain theoretical advantages over Mill's view. For example, co-referential names, such as Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain , cause problems for a directly referential view because it is possible for someone to hear "Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens" and be surprised – thus, their cognitive content seems different. Despite the differences between the views of Frege and Russell, they are generally lumped together as descriptivists about proper names. Such descriptivism

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984-430: A series of images of imaginary aliens. Whether each alien was friendly or hostile was determined by certain subtle features but participants were not told what these were. They had to guess whether each alien was friendly or hostile, and after each response they were told if they were correct or not, helping them learn the subtle cues that distinguished friend from foe. A quarter of the participants were told in advance that

1066-501: A theory of a modeled world and a component of knowledge-based systems . In particular, David Powers introduced the word ontology to AI to refer to real world or robotic grounding, publishing in 1990 literature reviews emphasizing grounded ontology in association with the call for papers for a AAAI Summer Symposium Machine Learning of Natural Language and Ontology, with an expanded version published in SIGART Bulletin and included as

1148-512: A way predicted by grammatical gender . For example, when asked to describe a "key"—a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish—the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard", "heavy", "jagged", "metal", "serrated" and "useful" whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden", "intricate", "little", "lovely", "shiny" and "tiny". To describe a "bridge", which

1230-451: A whole was understood to be a matter of philosophy of language. In continental philosophy , the foundational work in the field was Ferdinand de Saussure 's Cours de linguistique générale , published posthumously in 1916. The topic that has received the most attention in the philosophy of language has been the nature of meaning, to explain what "meaning" is, and what we mean when we talk about meaning. Within this area, issues include:

1312-676: Is a formal language used to encode an ontology. There are a number of such languages for ontologies, both proprietary and standards-based: The W3C Linking Open Data community project coordinates attempts to converge different ontologies into worldwide Semantic Web . The development of ontologies has led to the emergence of services providing lists or directories of ontologies called ontology libraries. The following are libraries of human-selected ontologies. The following are both directories and search engines. In general, ontologies can be used beneficially in several fields. Philosophy of language Philosophy of language investigates

1394-456: Is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization that is characterized by high semantic expressiveness required for increased complexity." Contemporary ontologies share many structural similarities, regardless of the language in which they are expressed. Most ontologies describe individuals (instances), classes (concepts), attributes and relations. A domain ontology (or domain-specific ontology) represents concepts which belong to

1476-656: Is a problem made easier when experts from different countries maintain a controlled vocabulary of jargon between each of their languages. For instance, the definition and ontology of economics is a primary concern in Marxist economics , but also in other subfields of economics . An example of economics relying on information science occurs in cases where a simulation or model is intended to enable economic decisions, such as determining what capital assets are at risk and by how much (see risk management ). What ontologies in both information science and philosophy have in common

1558-782: Is a recent event to see the issue sidestepped by having multiple domain ontologies using the same upper ontology like the OBO Foundry . An upper ontology (or foundation ontology) is a model of the commonly shared relations and objects that are generally applicable across a wide range of domain ontologies. It usually employs a core glossary that overarches the terms and associated object descriptions as they are used in various relevant domain ontologies. Standardized upper ontologies available for use include BFO , BORO method , Dublin Core , GFO , Cyc , SUMO , UMBEL , and DOLCE . WordNet has been considered an upper ontology by some and has been used as

1640-474: Is a tradition called speculative grammar which existed from the 11th to the 13th century. Leading scholars included Martin of Dacia and Thomas of Erfurt (see Modistae ). Linguists of the Renaissance and Baroque periods such as Johannes Goropius Becanus , Athanasius Kircher and John Wilkins were infatuated with the idea of a philosophical language reversing the confusion of tongues , influenced by

1722-431: Is common for ontology editors to use one or more ontology languages . Aspects of ontology editors include: visual navigation possibilities within the knowledge model , inference engines and information extraction ; support for modules; the import and export of foreign knowledge representation languages for ontology matching ; and the support of meta-ontologies such as OWL-S , Dublin Core , etc. Ontology learning

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1804-653: Is considered by some as a successor to prior work in philosophy. However many current efforts are more concerned with establishing controlled vocabularies of narrow domains than with philosophical first principles , or with questions such as the mode of existence of fixed essences or whether enduring objects (e.g., perdurantism and endurantism ) may be ontologically more primary than processes . Artificial intelligence has retained considerable attention regarding applied ontology in subfields like natural language processing within machine translation and knowledge representation , but ontology editors are being used often in

1886-546: Is deeply counterintuitive. Hence, names are rigid designators , according to Kripke. That is, they refer to the same individual in every possible world in which that individual exists. In the same work, Kripke articulated several other arguments against " Frege–Russell " descriptivism (see also Kripke's causal theory of reference ). The whole philosophical enterprise of studying reference has been critiqued by linguist Noam Chomsky in various works. It has long been known that there are different parts of speech . One part of

1968-606: Is different from them, and perceptibles are apprehended each by the one kind of organ, speech by another. Hence, since the objects of sight cannot be presented to any other organ but sight, and the different sense-organs cannot give their information to one another, similarly speech cannot give any information about perceptibles. Therefore, if anything exists and is comprehended, it is incommunicable. There are studies that prove that languages shape how people understand causality. Some of them were performed by Lera Boroditsky . For example, English speakers tend to say things like "John broke

2050-519: Is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said "beautiful", "elegant", "fragile", "peaceful", "pretty" and "slender", and the Spanish speakers said "big", "dangerous", "long", "strong", "sturdy" and "towering". This was the case even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. In a series of studies conducted by Gary Lupyan, people were asked to look at

2132-534: Is not necessarily true that if Aristotle existed then Aristotle was any one, or all, of these descriptions. Aristotle may well have existed without doing any single one of the things for which he is known to posterity. He may have existed and not have become known to posterity at all or he may have died in infancy. Suppose that Aristotle is associated by Mary with the description "the last great philosopher of antiquity" and (the actual) Aristotle died in infancy. Then Mary's description would seem to refer to Plato. But this

2214-477: Is often considered a proponent of extreme realism . Aristotle interested himself with issues of logic , categories, and the creation of meaning. He separated all things into categories of species and genus . He thought that the meaning of a predicate was established through an abstraction of the similarities between various individual things. This theory later came to be called nominalism . However, since Aristotle took these similarities to be constituted by

2296-473: Is partly something originally given, partly that which develops freely. And just as the individual can never reach the point at which he becomes absolutely independent ... so too with language. The phrase " linguistic turn " was used to describe the noteworthy emphasis that contemporary philosophers put upon language. Language began to play a central role in Western philosophy in the early 20th century. One of

2378-401: Is possible to use the concept of functions to describe more than just how lexical meanings work: they can also be used to describe the meaning of a sentence. In the sentence "The horse is red", "the horse" can be considered to be the product of a propositional function . A propositional function is an operation of language that takes an entity (in this case, the horse) as an input and outputs

2460-476: Is put together: syntactic and semantic trees. Syntactic trees draw upon the words of a sentence with the grammar of the sentence in mind; semantic trees focus upon the role of the meaning of the words and how those meanings combine to provide insight onto the genesis of semantic facts. Some of the major issues at the intersection of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind are also dealt with in modern psycholinguistics . Some important questions regard

2542-528: Is specified by the Visual Notation for OWL Ontologies (VOWL) . Ontology engineering (also called ontology building) is a set of tasks related to the development of ontologies for a particular domain. It is a subfield of knowledge engineering that studies the ontology development process, the ontology life cycle, the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, and the tools and languages that support them. Ontology engineering aims to make explicit

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2624-530: Is the attempt to represent entities, including both objects and events, with all their interdependent properties and relations, according to a system of categories. In both fields, there is considerable work on problems of ontology engineering (e.g., Quine and Kripke in philosophy, Sowa and Guarino in information science), and debates concerning to what extent normative ontology is possible (e.g., foundationalism and coherentism in philosophy, BFO and Cyc in artificial intelligence). Applied ontology

2706-584: Is the automatic or semi-automatic creation of ontologies, including extracting a domain's terms from natural language text. As building ontologies manually is extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming, there is great motivation to automate the process. Information extraction and text mining have been explored to automatically link ontologies to documents, for example in the context of the BioCreative challenges. Epistemological assumptions, which in research asks "What do you know? or "How do you know it?", creates

2788-424: Is the nature of reality?". One of five traditional branches of philosophy, metaphysics is concerned with exploring existence through properties, entities and relations such as those between particulars and universals , intrinsic and extrinsic properties , or essence and existence . Metaphysics has been an ongoing topic of discussion since recorded history. The compound word ontology combines onto - , from

2870-490: Is to what extent language influences thought and vice versa. There have been a number of different perspectives on this issue, each offering a number of insights and suggestions. Linguists Sapir and Whorf suggested that language limited the extent to which members of a "linguistic community" can think about certain subjects (a hypothesis paralleled in George Orwell 's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four ). In other words, language

2952-439: Is used in metaphor , metonyms and other figures of speech). A proper suppositio , in turn, can be either formal or material accordingly when it refers to its usual non-linguistic referent (as in "Charles is a man"), or to itself as a linguistic entity (as in " Charles has seven letters"). Such a classification scheme is the precursor of modern distinctions between use and mention , and between language and metalanguage. There

3034-458: Is used socially. Specific interests include the topics of language learning , language creation, and speech acts . Secondly, the question of how language relates to the minds of both the speaker and the interpreter is investigated. Of specific interest is the grounds for successful translation of words and concepts into their equivalents in another language. An important problem which touches both philosophy of language and philosophy of mind

3116-506: The Greek ὄν , on ( gen. ὄντος, ontos ), i.e. "being; that which is", which is the present participle of the verb εἰμί , eimí , i.e. "to be, I am", and -λογία , -logia , i.e. "logical discourse", see classical compounds for this type of word formation. While the etymology is Greek, the oldest extant record of the word itself, the Neo-Latin form ontologia , appeared in 1606 in

3198-686: The Vienna Circle , logical positivists , and Willard Van Orman Quine . In the West, inquiry into language stretches back to the 5th century BC with Socrates , Plato , Aristotle , and the Stoics . Linguistic speculation predated systematic descriptions of grammar which emerged c.  the 5th century BC in India and c.  the 3rd century BC in Greece. In the dialogue Cratylus , Plato considered

3280-524: The principle of compositionality to explain the relationship between meaningful parts and whole sentences. The principle of compositionality asserts that a sentence can be understood on the basis of the meaning of the parts of the sentence (i.e., words, morphemes) along with an understanding of its structure (i.e., syntax, logic). Further, syntactic propositions are arranged into discourse or narrative structures, which also encode meanings through pragmatics like temporal relations and pronominals. It

3362-498: The subsumption relation , but ontologies need not be limited to these forms. Ontologies are also not limited to conservative definitions  – that is, definitions in the traditional logic sense that only introduce terminology and do not add any knowledge about the world. To specify a conceptualization, one needs to state axioms that do constrain the possible interpretations for the defined terms. As refinement of Gruber's definition Feilmayr and Wöß (2016) stated: "An ontology

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3444-595: The agents of accidental events as well as did English speakers. Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blue in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue. The Piraha , a tribe in Brazil , whose language has only terms like few and many instead of numerals, are not able to keep track of exact quantities. In one study German and Spanish speakers were asked to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in

3526-437: The amount of innate language, if language acquisition is a special faculty in the mind, and what the connection is between thought and language. There are three general perspectives on the issue of language learning. The first is the behaviorist perspective, which dictates that not only is the solid bulk of language learned, but it is learned via conditioning. The second is the hypothesis testing perspective , which understands

3608-435: The brain when it comes to language. Connectionist models emphasize the idea that a person's lexicon and their thoughts operate in a kind of distributed, associative network. Nativist models assert that there are specialized devices in the brain that are dedicated to language acquisition. Computation models emphasize the notion of a representational language of thought and the logic-like, computational processing that

3690-400: The central figures involved in this development was the German philosopher Gottlob Frege , whose work on philosophical logic and the philosophy of language in the late 19th century influenced the work of 20th-century analytic philosophers Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein . The philosophy of language became so pervasive that for a time, in analytic philosophy circles, philosophy as

3772-401: The child's learning of syntactic rules and meanings to involve the postulation and testing of hypotheses, through the use of the general faculty of intelligence. The final candidate for explanation is the innatist perspective, which states that at least some of the syntactic settings are innate and hardwired, based on certain modules of the mind. There are varying notions of the structure of

3854-433: The common sentence is the lexical word , which is composed of nouns , verbs, and adjectives. A major question in the field – perhaps the single most important question for formalist and structuralist thinkers – is how the meaning of a sentence emerges from its parts. Many aspects of the problem of the composition of sentences are addressed in the field of linguistics of syntax . Philosophical semantics tends to focus on

3936-619: The early 19th century, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard insisted that language ought to play a larger role in Western philosophy . He argued that philosophy has not sufficiently focused on the role language plays in cognition and that future philosophy ought to proceed with a conscious focus on language: If the claim of philosophers to be unbiased were all it pretends to be, it would also have to take account of language and its whole significance in relation to speculative philosophy ... Language

4018-400: The effects of gendered language. It can also be used to study linguistic transparency (or speaking in an accessible manner), as well as performative utterances and the various tasks that language can perform (called "speech acts"). It also has applications to the study and interpretation of law, and helps give insight to the logical concept of the domain of discourse . Literary theory is

4100-447: The field of artificial intelligence (AI) have recognized that knowledge engineering is the key to building large and powerful AI systems . AI researchers argued that they could create new ontologies as computational models that enable certain kinds of automated reasoning , which was only marginally successful . In the 1980s, the AI community began to use the term ontology to refer to both

4182-613: The first serious proposals for codifying a mental language. The scholastics of the high medieval period, such as Ockham and John Duns Scotus , considered logic to be a scientia sermocinalis (science of language). The result of their studies was the elaboration of linguistic-philosophical notions whose complexity and subtlety has only recently come to be appreciated. Many of the most interesting problems of modern philosophy of language were anticipated by medieval thinkers. The phenomena of vagueness and ambiguity were analyzed intensely, and this led to an increasing interest in problems related to

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4264-426: The foundation researchers use when approaching a certain topic or area for potential research. As epistemology is directly linked to knowledge and how we come about accepting certain truths, individuals conducting academic research must understand what allows them to begin theory building. Simply, epistemological assumptions force researchers to question how they arrive at the knowledge they have. An ontology language

4346-409: The friendly aliens were called "leebish" and the hostile ones "grecious", while another quarter were told the opposite. For the rest, the aliens remained nameless. It was found that participants who were given names for the aliens learned to categorize the aliens far more quickly, reaching 80 per cent accuracy in less than half the time taken by those not told the names. By the end of the test, those told

4428-493: The gradual discovery of Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs ( Hieroglyphica ). This thought parallels the idea that there might be a universal language of music. European scholarship began to absorb the Indian linguistic tradition only from the mid-18th century, pioneered by Jean François Pons and Henry Thomas Colebrooke (the editio princeps of Varadarāja , a 17th-century Sanskrit grammarian, dating to 1849). In

4510-419: The knowledge contained in software applications, and organizational procedures for a particular domain. Ontology engineering offers a direction for overcoming semantic obstacles, such as those related to the definitions of business terms and software classes. Known challenges with ontology engineering include: Ontology editors are applications designed to assist in the creation or manipulation of ontologies. It

4592-462: The meanings of mental contents and states directly. Another tradition of philosophers has attempted to show that language and thought are coextensive – that there is no way of explaining one without the other. Donald Davidson, in his essay "Thought and Talk", argued that the notion of belief could only arise as a product of public linguistic interaction. Daniel Dennett holds a similar interpretationist view of propositional attitudes . To an extent,

4674-424: The mind performs over them. Emergentist models focus on the notion that natural faculties are a complex system that emerge from simpler biological parts. Reductionist models attempt to explain higher-level mental processes in terms of the basic low-level neurophysiological activity. Firstly, this field of study seeks to better understand what speakers and listeners do with language in communication , and how it

4756-619: The mind. The main argument in favor of such a view is that the structure of thoughts and the structure of language seem to share a compositional, systematic character. Another argument is that it is difficult to explain how signs and symbols on paper can represent anything meaningful unless some sort of meaning is infused into them by the contents of the mind. One of the main arguments against is that such levels of language can lead to an infinite regress. In any case, many philosophers of mind and language, such as Ruth Millikan , Fred Dretske and Fodor, have recently turned their attention to explaining

4838-401: The names could correctly categorize 88 per cent of aliens, compared to just 80 per cent for the rest. It was concluded that naming objects helps us categorize and memorize them. In another series of experiments, a group of people was asked to view furniture from an IKEA catalog. Half the time they were asked to label the object – whether it was a chair or lamp, for example – while the rest of

4920-455: The nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning , intentionality , reference , the constitution of sentences, concepts, learning , and thought . Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell were pivotal figures in analytic philosophy's " linguistic turn ". These writers were followed by Ludwig Wittgenstein ( Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ),

5002-479: The nature of synonymy , the origins of meaning itself, our apprehension of meaning, and the nature of composition (the question of how meaningful units of language are composed of smaller meaningful parts, and how the meaning of the whole is derived from the meaning of its parts). There have been several distinctive explanations of what a linguistic "meaning" is. Each has been associated with its own body of literature. Investigations into how language interacts with

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5084-648: The only directly referential expressions are what he called "logically proper names". Logically proper names are such terms as I , now , here and other indexicals . He viewed proper names of the sort described above as "abbreviated definite descriptions " (see Theory of descriptions ). Hence Joseph R. Biden may be an abbreviation for "the current President of the United States and husband of Jill Biden". Definite descriptions are denoting phrases (see " On Denoting ") which are analyzed by Russell into existentially quantified logical constructions. Such phrases denote in

5166-400: The particular words that people use to achieve the proper emotional and rational effect in the listener, be it to persuade, provoke, endear, or teach. Some relevant applications of the field include the examination of propaganda and didacticism , the examination of the purposes of swearing and pejoratives (especially how it influences the behaviors of others, and defines relationships), or

5248-407: The philosopher of language. For instance, one of the major fields of sociology, symbolic interactionism , is based on the insight that human social organization is based almost entirely on the use of meanings. In consequence, any explanation of a social structure (like an institution ) would need to account for the shared meanings which create and sustain the structure. Rhetoric is the study of

5330-423: The question of whether the names of things were determined by convention or by nature. He criticized conventionalism because it led to the bizarre consequence that anything can be conventionally denominated by any name. Hence, it cannot account for the correct or incorrect application of a name. He claimed that there was a natural correctness to names. To do this, he pointed out that compound words and phrases have

5412-528: The same project. As systems that rely on domain ontologies expand, they often need to merge domain ontologies by hand-tuning each entity or using a combination of software merging and hand-tuning. This presents a challenge to the ontology designer. Different ontologies in the same domain arise due to different languages, different intended usage of the ontologies, and different perceptions of the domain (based on cultural background, education, ideology, etc.) . At present, merging ontologies that are not developed from

5494-404: The sense that there is an object that satisfies the description. However, such objects are not to be considered meaningful on their own, but have meaning only in the proposition expressed by the sentences of which they are a part. Hence, they are not directly referential in the same way as logically proper names, for Russell. On Frege's account, any referring expression has a sense as well as

5576-504: The sign itself and the thing to which it refers. This lektón was the meaning or sense of every term. The complete lektón of a sentence is what we would now call its proposition . Only propositions were considered truth-bearing —meaning they could be considered true or false—while sentences were simply their vehicles of expression. Different lektá could also express things besides propositions, such as commands, questions and exclamations. Medieval philosophers were greatly interested in

5658-519: The social conditions that give rise to, or are associated with, meanings and languages. Etymology (the study of the origins of words) and stylistics (philosophical argumentation over what makes "good grammar", relative to a particular language) are two other examples of fields that are taken to be metasemantic. Many separate (but related) fields have investigated the topic of linguistic convention within their own research paradigms. The presumptions that prop up each theoretical view are of interest to

5740-578: The study of meaning at all. Noam Chomsky proposed that the study of language could be done in terms of the I-Language, or internal language of persons. If this is so, then it undermines the pursuit of explanations in terms of conventions, and relegates such explanations to the domain of metasemantics . Metasemantics is a term used by philosopher of language Robert Stainton to describe all those fields that attempt to explain how semantic facts arise. One fruitful source of research involves investigation into

5822-428: The subtleties of language and its usage. For many scholastics , this interest was provoked by the necessity of translating Greek texts into Latin . There were several noteworthy philosophers of language in the medieval period. According to Peter J. King, (although this has been disputed), Peter Abelard anticipated the modern theories of reference . Also, William of Ockham 's Summa Logicae brought forward one of

5904-652: The term as a specification of a conceptualization : An ontology is a description (like a formal specification of a program) of the concepts and relationships that can formally exist for an agent or a community of agents. This definition is consistent with the usage of ontology as set of concept definitions, but more general. And it is a different sense of the word than its use in philosophy. Attempting to distance ontologies from taxonomies and similar efforts in knowledge modeling that rely on classes and inheritance , Gruber stated (1993): Ontologies are often equated with taxonomic hierarchies of classes, class definitions, and

5986-493: The theoretical underpinnings to cognitive semantics (including the notion of semantic framing ) suggest the influence of language upon thought. However, the same tradition views meaning and grammar as a function of conceptualization, making it difficult to assess in any straightforward way. Some thinkers, like the ancient sophist Gorgias , have questioned whether or not language was capable of capturing thought at all. ...speech can never exactly represent perceptibles, since it

6068-571: The thought that its embedding sentence expresses. Senses determine reference and are also the modes of presentation of the objects to which expressions refer. Referents are the objects in the world that words pick out. The senses of sentences are thoughts, while their referents are truth values (true or false). The referents of sentences embedded in propositional attitude ascriptions and other opaque contexts are their usual senses. Bertrand Russell , in his later writings and for reasons related to his theory of acquaintance in epistemology , held that

6150-507: The time they had to say whether or not they liked it. It was found that when asked to label items, people were later less likely to recall the specific details of products, such as whether a chair had arms or not. It was concluded that labeling objects helps our minds build a prototype of the typical object in the group at the expense of individual features. A common claim is that language is governed by social conventions. Questions inevitably arise on surrounding topics. One question regards what

6232-418: The use of syncategorematic words such as and , or , not , if , and every . The study of categorematic words (or terms ) and their properties was also developed greatly. One of the major developments of the scholastics in this area was the doctrine of the suppositio . The suppositio of a term is the interpretation that is given of it in a specific context. It can be proper or improper (as when it

6314-512: The vase" even for accidents. However, Spanish or Japanese speakers would be more likely to say "the vase broke itself". In studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford University speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese watched videos of two people popping balloons, breaking eggs and spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally. Later everyone was asked whether they could remember who did what. Spanish and Japanese speakers did not remember

6396-568: The work Ogdoas Scholastica by Jacob Lorhard ( Lorhardus ) and in 1613 in the Lexicon philosophicum by Rudolf Göckel ( Goclenius ). The first occurrence in English of ontology as recorded by the OED ( Oxford English Dictionary , online edition, 2008) came in Archeologia Philosophica Nova or New Principles of Philosophy by Gideon Harvey . Since the mid-1970s, researchers in

6478-418: The world are called theories of reference . Gottlob Frege was an advocate of a mediated reference theory . Frege divided the semantic content of every expression, including sentences, into two components: sense and reference . The sense of a sentence is the thought that it expresses. Such a thought is abstract, universal and objective. The sense of any sub-sentential expression consists in its contribution to

6560-636: Was analytically prior to thought. Philosopher Michael Dummett is also a proponent of the "language-first" viewpoint. The stark opposite to the Sapir–Whorf position is the notion that thought (or, more broadly, mental content) has priority over language. The "knowledge-first" position can be found, for instance, in the work of Paul Grice . Further, this view is closely associated with Jerry Fodor and his language of thought hypothesis. According to his argument, spoken and written language derive their intentionality and meaning from an internal language encoded in

6642-469: Was criticized in Saul Kripke 's Naming and Necessity . Kripke put forth what has come to be known as "the modal argument" (or "argument from rigidity"). Consider the name Aristotle and the descriptions "the greatest student of Plato", "the founder of logic" and "the teacher of Alexander". Aristotle obviously satisfies all of the descriptions (and many of the others we commonly associate with him), but it

6724-564: Was first described in an academic article in 2005. This biology article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Ontology (information science) Every academic discipline or field, in creating its terminology, thereby lays the groundwork for an ontology. Each uses ontological assumptions to frame explicit theories, research and applications. Improved ontologies may improve problem solving within that domain, interoperability of data systems, and discoverability of data. Translating research papers within every field

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