Abstract
Reification is a standard technique in conceptual modeling, which consists of including in the domain of discourse entities that may otherwise be hidden or implicit. However, deciding what should be reified is not always easy. Recent work on formal ontology offers us a simple answer: put in the domain of discourse those entities that are responsible for the (alleged) truth of our propositions. These are called truthmakers. Re-visiting previous work, we propose in this paper a systematic analysis of truthmaking patterns for properties and relations based on the ontological nature of their truthmakers. Truthmaking patterns will be presented as generalization of reification patterns, accounting for the fact that, in some cases, we do not reify a property or a relationship directly, but we rather reify its truthmakers.
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Notes
- 1.
Of course, there may be many of such events. Each of them would be a TM.
- 2.
Even if the color does not change, multiple strong TMs are necessary as time passes by, since each occurrence is different from the previous or future occurrences.
- 3.
Space does not allow to discuss the notion of minimality in detail. In short, we assume that an entity x is internal to y iff x inheres in, is a proper part of or participates to y, and external to y otherwise. Then, if t is a TM for a proposition P, it is a minimal TM for P iff no entity internal to t is itself a TM of P.
- 4.
For clarity purposes, all models here are represented in OntoUML [14]. No commitment on OntoUML is however assumed.
- 5.
The choice of reifying a weak TM only arises for those non-descriptive properties whose minimal weak TM does not coincide with their argument. In such cases, the weak TM is typically an argument’s proper part (say, a nose for having a nose) or something that includes the argument as a proper part.
- 6.
In the original paper [10], we labeled this distinction ‘intrinsic/extrinsic’, aiming at extending to relations the terminology adopted for properties. However, in the philosophical literature ‘external relation’ is not synonym of ‘extrinsic relation’, since the latter requires the existence of something completely external to the relata.
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Guarino, N., Sales, T.P., Guizzardi, G. (2018). Reification and Truthmaking Patterns. In: Trujillo, J., et al. Conceptual Modeling. ER 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11157. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00847-5_13
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