Revealing ontological commitments by magic.

Ideological parsimony

The theoretical virtue of parsimony values the minimizing of theoretical commitments, but theoretical commitments come in two kinds: ontological and ideological. While the ontological commitments of a theory are the entities it posits, a theory’s ideological commitments are the primitive concepts it employs. Here, I show how we can extend the distinction between quantitative and qualitative par...

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...

Truthmaker commitments

On the truthmaker view of ontological commitment [Heil (From an ontological point of view, 2003); Armstrong (Truth and truthmakers, 2004); Cameron (Philosophical Studies, 2008)], a theory is committed to the entities needed in the world for the theory to be made true. I argue that this view puts truthmaking to the wrong task. None of the leading accounts of truthmaking—via necessitation, superv...

A Puzzle About Ontological Commitments

Ontological Analysis of Taxonomic Relationships

Taxonomies based on a partial-ordering relation commonly known as is-a, class inclusion or subsumption have become an important tool in conceptual modeling. A well-formed taxonomy has significant implications for understanding, reuse, and integration, however the intuitive simplicity of taxonomic relations has led to widespread misuse, making clear the need for rigorous analysis techniques. Whe...