A Puzzle About Ontological Commitments

A Puzzle About Ontological Commitments

Formalizing Ontological Commitments

Formalizing the ontological commitment of a logical language means offering a way to specify the intended meaning of its vocabulary by constraining the set of its models, giving explicit information about the intended nature of the modelling primitives and their a priori relationships. We present here a formal definition of ontological commitment which aims to capture the very basic ontological...

Revealing ontological commitments by magic.

Considering the appeal of different magical transformations exposes some systematic asymmetries. For example, it is more interesting to transform a vase into a rose than a rose into a vase. An experiment in which people judged how interesting they found different magic tricks showed that these asymmetries reflect the direction a transformation moves in an ontological hierarchy: transformations ...

The Ontological Commitments of Logical

This paper is partly inspired by a well-known debate between Ruth Barean Marcus, Terence Parsons and W. V. O. Quine in the sixties) coneerning the extent to whieh Quantified Modal Logie ('QMr: heneeforth) is committed to Hessentialism"; the issue nevertheless goes back to the origins of "analytic philosophy': to the reflections of Frege, Russell, and the eadier Wittgenstein on the nature of log...

Ontological Commitments of Ethics and Economics

This paper analyses the cognitive image schemas structuring the ontological commitments of dominant conceptions of ethics and economics to show that the content of economics is implicated in conceptions of ethics, and that these conceptions cannot be separated from questions of research and professional ethics. This analysis of the metaphoric structuring of the ontological commitments of ethics...