In a keynote at FOIS 2024, Øystein Linnebo proposed and motivated the reassessment and reconstruction of foundational formal ontologies via the constructive approaches exploited in philosophical logic. The proposal has attracted attention due to a series of potentially positive consequences: conceptual clarity on the adopted entities and constructors, structural clarity regarding the ontology organisation, completeness of the ontology relative to the combinatorics of elements and operators, and conceptual and logical consistency of the whole system. It remains unclear how the constructive approach would work on today’s foundational ontologies, and how it can cope with the concerns that led to building such systems. To start addressing this issue, in this paper we consider three approaches on foundational ontologies like BFO, DOLCE and UFO, to investigate how these systems might be seen as contructive-like structures. This analysis is a first step towards Linnebo’s proposal, it serves to highlight aspects that require more investigation to implement the proposal, and suggests what kind of work and considerations are needed to turn today’s foundational formal ontologies into constructive-based ontological systems.

This paper studies conceptual evolution and ways to capture concepts’ continuity despite their change. The proposal laid down in this paper is to interpret concepts as variable embodiments as first introduced by Fine. The main question of the paper is how to understand the principle of variable embodiment in the case of concepts. The paper proposes to use a specific notion of conceptual coherence to constrain the principle of variable embodiment. In general, the idea is that concepts must retain some shared information at different points in time. Conceptual coherence is defined as an overlap in topic, specifically captured through the intersection of possible generalisations of a concept at different moments. To formalise this idea, a framework incorporating refinement operators is proposed and its applicability is illustrated through the analysis of various examples from the literature.

When considering two concepts in terms of extensional logic, their combination will often be trivial, returning an empty extension. Consider e.g. “a Fish Vehicle”, i.e., “a Vehicle which is also a Fish”. Still, people use sophisticated strategies to produce new, non-empty concepts. All these strategies involve the human ability to mend the conflicting attributes of the input concepts and to create new properties of the combination. We focus in particular on the case where a Head concept has superior ‘asymmetric’ control over steering the resulting combination (or hybridisation) with a Modifier concept. Specifically, we propose a dialogical model of the cognitive and logical mechanics of this asymmetric form of hybridisation. Its implementation is then evaluated using a combination of example ontologies.

When people combine concepts these are often characterised as “hybrid”, “impossible”, or “humorous”. However, when simply considering them in terms of extensional logic, the novel concepts understood as a conjunctive concept will often lack meaning having an empty extension (consider “a tooth that is a chair”, “a pet flower”, etc.). Still, people use different strategies to produce new non-empty concepts: additive or integrative combination of features, alignment of features, instantiation, etc. All these strategies involve the ability to deal with conflicting attributes and the creation of new (combinations of) properties. We here consider in particular the case where a Head concept has superior ‘asymmetric’ control over steering the resulting concept combination (or hybridisation) with a Modifier concept. Specifically, we propose a dialogical approach to concept combination and discuss an implementation based on axiom weakening, which models the cognitive and logical mechanics of this asymmetric form of hybridisation.