Constitutive Rules, Language, and Ontology

Arbitral Functions and Constitutive Rules

It is nowadays widely recognized that constitutive rules play a key role in social ontology. Their definitional character is the primary source of the meaning of every rule-based activity, but what can ensure the persistence of this activity? The most common reply found in literature is to rely on social acceptance; even though this is certainly true, it is nonetheless not sufficient to explain...

Ontology in association rules

Data mining has emerged to address the problem of transforming data into useful knowledge. Although most data mining techniques, such as the use of association rules, may substantially reduce the search effort over large data sets, often, the consequential outcomes surpass the amount of information humanly manageable. On the other hand, important association rules may be overlooked owing to the...

Ontology Language

Constitutive Rules for Agent Communication Languages

We follow Searle's contention that speaking a (natural) language is to engage in a rulegoverned form of behaviour, and that those rules are conventional (institutional) rather than natural or physical. We show how this analysis can also be used to specify rules of interaction for systems of electronic agents communicating with an artificial language. We conclude that using constitutive rules to...

On the Logic of Constitutive Rules

The paper proposes a logical systematization of the notion of countsas which is grounded on a very simple intuition about what counts-as statements actually mean, i.e., forms of classification. Moving from this analytical thesis the paper disentangles three semantically different readings of statements of the type X counts as Y in context C, from the weaker notion of contextual classification t...