Last week, the second SCOR online seminar took place, providing a great opportunity to invite Adrien Barton (CNRS, IRIT). He gave a presentation on a topic that is both theoretically deep and practically important: the meanings in ontology. While the content was rich and occasionally dense, the talk was truly “meaningful”.
The abstract and recording of his talk are available below. If you’d like to stay updated about upcoming SCOR online seminars and other SCOR-related events, you can subscribe to our newsletter (at the bottom of the homepage) and/or follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/swissonto/.
Adrien Barton (CNRS, IRIT)
“The Interconnection of Meanings in Ontology”
Abstract
The construction of large interconnected sets of ontologies relies on the assumption that the meanings of terms can be defined independently. However, the thesis of meaning holism suggests that the meanings of all words in a language are interdependent. We investigate the real extent of meaning holism by analyzing meaning in applied ontologies through the use of possible world semantics and differentiating it from meaning linguistic specifications. We use the influential framework of Guarino, Oberle, and Staab to construe analytic statements, whose truths depend only on the meanings of their terms, as necessary statements that are true in every metaphysically possible world; we then extend this framework to synthetic statements, including those that express empirical knowledge. We distinguish descriptivist and Kripke’s rigid designator ways of defining class terms. We discuss how an ontological engineering practice focused on individual ontological terms rather than on ontologies could help to manage meaning dependencies and mitigate the problem of meaning holism.
Short bio
Adrien Barton is a CNRS researcher at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT), France. He is also a guest researcher at GRIIS of University of Sherbrooke, Canada (QC). Trained in philosophy, mathematics and physics, he has been working on ontologies from an interdisciplinary perspective.
This seminar relates to the article “Meaning Holism and Indeterminacy of Reference in Ontologies”, which received the distinguished paper award in the FOIS 2024 conference.