Interval temporal logics are based on temporal structures where time intervals, rather than time instants, are the primitive ontological entities. They employ modal operators corresponding to various relations between intervals, known as Allen’s relations. Technically, validity in interval temporal logics translates to dyadic second-order logic, thus explaining their complex computational behav...

Actor-Network Theory and the related ontological turn is one of most important paradigmatic changes in contemporary social sciences. In Polish archaeological discourse not widely discussed. The paper presents basic assumptions theory focusing on its potential for conceptualization sources relationship between humans environment.

The aim of the paper is to present a heuristic method for extracting the most general decision rules from linguistic data describing economic phenomena included in simple decision systems over ontological graphs. Such decision systems have been proposed to deal with linguistic attribute values, describing objects of interest, which are concepts placed in semantic spaces expressed by means of on...

A formal analysis of the problem of parametric design is given on the basis of the competence-theory approach to problem solving methods. In particular, the ontological commitments and assumptions underlying some problem solving methods as used in the VT task are investigated.

The intention of this paper is to highlight and demonstrate the importance of three ontological assumptions in information technology for development (ITD) research; structure, agency, and causality. We argue that these three assumptions are 1) inherent in all social theory, and thus in ITD research, and 2) underdetermined by the current dominant philosophical approaches to research. Therefore,...

Among Quine’s main concerns in his “On What There Is”, there was that of solving a problem of expressibility for ontological denials. His proposed solution to such a problem was, in a purely Carnapian vein, a shift of attention to the semantic features of ontological claims – what Quine called the strategy of “semantic ascent”. Quine’s relevant assumption is that talk about language is much les...

As is well known, there are two crucial arguments in the realism debate. According to the no-miracles argument, it would be a miracle if our best scientific theories – namely, those which successfully predict novel phenomena – were not true (or approximately true). So, we should take theories that yield novel predictions as being true or, at least, approximately so. Clearly, considerations of t...

Kurt Gödel’s ontological argument for God’s existence has been formalized and automated on a computer with higher-order automated theorem provers. From Gödel’s premises, the computer proved: necessarily, there exists God. On the other hand, the theorem provers have also confirmed prominent criticism on Gödel’s ontological argument, and they found some new results about it. The background theory...

The thesis of methodological individualism in social science is commonly divided into two different claims – explanatory individualism and ontological individualism. Ontological individualism is the thesis that facts about individuals exhaustively determine social facts. Initially taken to be a claim about the identity of groups with sets of individuals or their properties, ontological individu...

We extend traditional functional dependencies (FDs) for data quality purposes to accommodate ontological variations in the attribute values. We begin by formally defining a novel class of dependencies called ontological FDs, which strictly generalize traditional FDs by allowing differences controlled by an ontology database. The ontology databases contain information about synonyms. We then foc...