This paper outlines a method, called reconciliation, for managing interference between partial specifications or viewpoints. The method supports the detection, verification and tracking of ontological overlaps. The paper describes the heuristics on which the method is based and illustrates the application of the method to a scenario.

New approaches to production management can be conceptualized as treating production as flow rather than transformation. These alternatives can in turn be regarded as reflecting opposing ontological positions, holding respectively that reality is constituted of temporal process, or atemporal substance. The new production philosophy thus arguably represents a process ontology radically different...

This article examines Gibson’s concept of perceptual system and Reed’s concept of action system. After discussing several assumptions underlying these concepts, the ontological status of these systems is considered. It is argued that perceptual systems and action systems should be conceptualized neither as parts of an animal’s body nor as softly (temporarily) assembled devices; rather, they are...

Marshall was the great synthesiser of neoclassical economics. Yet with his qualified assumption of self-interest, his emphasis on variation in economic evolution, and his cautious attitude to the use of mathematics, Marshall differs fundamentally from other leading neoclassical contemporaries. Metaphors inspire more specific analogies and ontological assumptions, and Marshall used the guiding m...

In this paper, we describe an approach by which one agent may infer the categorical preference structure of another agent in relation to a set of alternative proposals made in negotiation. The categorical preferences are inferred over a sequence of proposals, as preferences are disclosed one at a time. We seek to avoid strong ontological commitment between the agents, making only minimal assump...

Process studies focus attention on how itnd why things emerge, develop, grow, or terminate over time. We identify various ontological assumptions underl)ring process research, explore its methods and challenges, and draw out some of its substantive contributions revealed in this Special Research Forum on Process Studies of Change in Organization and Management. Process studies take time serious...

This article explores practices of witnessing global warming developed in recent years by climate movements Poland. Timothy Morton’s concept the “hyperobject” acts as a starting point for discussion ontological assumptions that underlie theories and witnessing, development an expanded includes future, collectivity, nonhumans. These considerations are followed description three interpreted warmi...

Databases have collected masses of information concerning cell signaling pathways that includes information on pathways, molecular interactions as well as molecular complexes. However we have no general data model to represent comprehensive properties of cell signaling pathways, so that this type of information has been represented by two different data models that we call 'binary relation' and...

Being and Time, Heidegger praises Kant as “the first and only person who has gone any stretch of the way towards investigating the dimension of temporality or has even let himself be drawn hither by the coercion of the phenomena themselves” (SZ: 23). Kant was, before Husserl (and perhaps, in Heidegger's mind, more than him), a true phenomenologist in the sense that the need to curtail the prete...

Advocates of the New Mechanicism in philosophy of science argue that scientific explanation often consists in describing mechanisms responsible for natural phenomena. Despite its successes, one might think that this approach does not square with the ontological strictures of quantum mechanics. New Mechanists suppose that mechanisms are composed of objects with definite properties, which are int...