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Understanding Characteristics of Evolved Instances for State-of-the-Art Inexact TSP Solvers with Maximum Performance Difference Read chapter Read first chapter

2016 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Relationships and Events: Towards a General Theory of Reification and Truthmaking

Authors : Nicola Guarino, Giancarlo Guizzardi

Published in: AI*IA 2016 Advances in Artificial Intelligence

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

We propose a novel ontological analysis of relations and relationships based on a re-visitation of a classic problem in the practice of knowledge representation and conceptual modeling, namely relationship reification. Our idea is that a relation holds in virtue of a relationship’s existence. Relationships are therefore truthmakers of relations. In this paper we present a general theory or reification and truthmaking, and discuss the interplay between events and relationships, suggesting that relationships are the focus of events, which emerge from the context (the scene) they occur in.

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Footnotes
1
The notion of truthmaking will be further discussed and refined.
 
2
For the time being, we are using here the term ‘event’ in its most general sense, as a synonym of what in the DOLCE ontology are called perdurants (note that also states and processes are considered as perdurants). In the rest of the paper, we propose a more restricted notion of event.
 
3
Another way to capture this meaning is to add attributes to the original tuple, which somehow express the properties the relationship has. This is the approach followed by Thalheim [7], who defines a relationship type as a sequence of entity types followed by a set of attributes.
 
4
By ‘a relation that deserves reification’ we mean a relation that deserves reification of its relationships. Informally, we talk of reification of a relation to mean reification of its relationships.
 
5
Of course, one could consider heavier(John@t, Mary@t) to be a relation between the states (snapshots) of John and Mary at t. In this case, the relation would hold internally if at all.
 
6
We shall take the notion of intrinsic property as primitive. Intuitively, an intrinsic property is a property that holds for an entity independently of the existence of any other entity.
 
7
See the recent overview by MacBride [11] of the various philosophical positions on relations. According to him, there are three ways of understanding the internal/external distinction: “internal relations are determined by the mere existence of the things they relate, or internal relations are determined by the intrinsic characters of the things they relate, or internal relations supervene upon the intrinsic characters of the things they relate”. The first position (adopted by Simons) is due to Moore. The second one is due to Armstrong, while the third one to Lewis.
 
8
Another answer could be that the truthmaker is a fact of redness. In light of the discussion in [1] against facts as a viable interpretation for relationships, we do not consider this option here.
 
9
For our purposes, we define a minimal truthmaker of a proposition as a truthmaker such that no entity inhering in it, being part of it or participating to it is itself a truthmaker of the same proposition.
 
10
We shall not discuss the differences among these ontologies concerning the notion of quality. In particular, we shall ignore the fact that DOLCE does not consider qualities as endurants, and we shall collapse, for the sake of simplicity, UFO’s distinction between qualities and modes.
 
11
This notion of individual qualities as endurants is similar to Moltmann’s variable tropes.
 
12
The mereological sum of x and y is an entity z such that whatever overlaps z also overlaps x or y (see, for instance, [2], Chap. 5).
 
13
We understand participation as a formal relation linking endurants to perdurants [13].
 
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Metadata
Title
Relationships and Events: Towards a General Theory of Reification and Truthmaking
Authors
Nicola Guarino
Giancarlo Guizzardi
Copyright Year
2016
Book
AI*IA 2016 Advances in Artificial Intelligence

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-49129-5

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-49130-1

Copyright Year: 2016

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49130-1_18

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