OntologyIncoming LinksFebruary 25th, 2021At the extreme limit of realism, I would have to simulate the whole universe as perceived by my brain. Since that's infeasible, I have to make drastic simplifications. I have to make a caricature of my life, imposing a kind of cartoonish Ontology.📰 Meaningful Perception | Meta-RationalityWhat you see something as depends on your knowledge, context, and purposes. If you are familiar with moussaka and you see it on a plate in a restaurant, you’ll probably see it as moussaka. If you aren’t, you’ll probably see it as a mushy casserole. You can’t see it as moussaka, because that’s not part of your Ontology.Because perception evolved to enable purposeful activities, most of the time it reveals meaningful functions and potentials. Those are a matter of Ontology: not just categories, but also how you separate the world into objects; what properties you see them having; and how they relate to each other.📙 Being-In-The-WorldSuch an understanding is contained in our knowing-how-to-cope in various domains rather than in a set of beliefs that such and such is the case. Thus we embody an understanding of being that no one has in mind. We have an Ontology without knowing it.Even if [traditional] Ontology should itself succeed in explicating the being of Nature in the very purest manner, in conformity with the basic assertions about this entity which the mathematical natural sciences provide, it will never reach the phenomenon that is the "world."*Nature by itself obviously cannot explain significance. Therefore, to account for the Equipmental whole in terms of occurrent elements, traditional Ontology, as developed by Descartes and still found in Husserlian phenomenology, information processing psychology, and Artificial Intelligence research, must supplement the bare things in Nature that serve in the explanations provided by natural science, with function or value predicates.'Traditional Ontology has always sought to understand the everyday world by finding something on the level of the occurrent, such as substance, sense data, or representations in transcendental consciousness, that is supposed to be Intelligible without reference to anything else, and then sought to show how everything else can be seen to be Intelligible because it is built up out of these self-sufficient elements.The world is what we directly understand and in terms of which one can see how Nature, Equipment, Persons, etc. fit together and make sense. Thus worldliness and Dasein's correlative understanding of being are the proper themes for Ontology.We have seen that traditional Ontology in its modern form begins when Descartes takes bits of objective space (res extensa) as the elements in terms of which to explain everything in the world. Heidegger now turns explicitly to showing the limits of this Ontology and also to giving it its legitimate place.📙 Building Ontologies With Basic Formal OntologyFull Title: Building Ontologies With Basic Formal OntologyThe implications of perspectivalism for Ontology are that the irreducibility of different perspectives should be respected also in the design of ontologies. Ontology developers should not seek to represent all portions and features of reality in a single Ontology, but should seek, rather, a modular approach, in which each module is maintained as far as possible by experts in the corresponding scientific discipline.Some specific implications of fallibilism for Ontology design in support of scientific research include the following: 3a. That every Ontology must have sophisticated strategies for keeping track of successive versions of the Ontology.A final general principle to keep in mind is the following: when designing a domain Ontology, begin by identifying those features of the subject matter that are the easiest and clearest to understand and define.📙 HyperobjectsOntology, then, is a vital and contested political terrain.