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On the Realism of Human and Machine Representational Constraints: A Functionalist Account on Cognitive Ontologies

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Representation and Reality in Humans, Other Living Organisms and Intelligent Machines

Part of the book series: Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics ((SAPERE,volume 28))

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the primitive constraints on Information Systems’ and Humans’ representations of the reality. We intend to support the idea that a proper understanding of what is at stake in Information Systems Ontologies (ISO) and its relation to the representational constraints in human cognition may solve a recent issue about the status of philosophical intuitions in metaphysics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “The ontological problem for computer and information science is thus identical to many of the problems of philosophical ontology, and it is becoming more and more clear that success in the former will be achievable, if at all, only by appeal to the methods, insights and theories of the latter” [69]:7.

  2. 2.

    It should be acknowledged that Folk Physics also drew the attention of researchers in Artificial Intelligence. This interest led to Prolog or Lisp-based implementations of various automatic systems of physical deductions known as the Naive Physics—see [1, 60] for details.

  3. 3.

    “And this recognition leads straightaway to one of the fundamental theses of ontology: to be is to be an item of a certain type or kind” [55]:26.

  4. 4.

    “the primary concern of knowledge engineering is modeling systems in the world, not replicating how people think” [14]:34.

  5. 5.

    “The best solution is to countenance two metaphysical categories of events, EVENTS 1 and EVENTS 2. This is how cognitive science can play a role in the conduct of metaphysicalizing.” [25]:475.

  6. 6.

    “Metaphysics seeks to understand the nature of the world as it is independently of how we think of it” [25]:457.

  7. 7.

    “I am not saying that the analysis of personal concepts is the be-all and end-all of, philosophy, even the analytical part of philosophy. But perhaps we can move from concepts 2 to concepts 3, i.e. shared (psychological) concepts”. [26]:16-7.

  8. 8.

    “My favored kind of epistemological naturalism holds that warrant, or justification, arises from, or supervenes on, psychological processes that are causally responsible for belief (Goldman 1986, 1994).” [26]:19.

  9. 9.

    “A first reply is that, in my view, there is no incompatibility between naturalism and a priori warrant” [26]:19.

  10. 10.

    “Having attempted to establish premises (1)–(4), it is now time to draw conclusions from the incompatibility of naturalized metaphysics with a commitment to robust realism about the entities in metaphysical theories” [2]:292.

  11. 11.

    ”The argument is that neither empiricism nor idealism can successfully explain these occurrences and that they necessitate some form of realist ontology” [49]:92.

  12. 12.

    “The ontological problem of information repository construction and management is not, however, simply the problem of agreeing on the use of a common vocabulary” [69]:7.

  13. 13.

    “Rather, it is the problem of adopting a (sometimes very general) set of basic categories of objects, of determining what kinds of entities fall within each of these categories of objects, and of determining what relationships hold within and amongst the different categories in the ontology” [69]:7.

  14. 14.

    As an example,‘Event’ is a category explicitly spatio-temporally interpreted in Dolce while it does not exist per se in Bfo 1.1 and 2.0.

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  1. IHPST, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, Paris, France

    David Zarebski

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    Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic

  2. Faculty of Philosophy, Pontifical Lateran University, Vatican City, Italy

    Raffaela Giovagnoli

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Zarebski, D. (2017). On the Realism of Human and Machine Representational Constraints: A Functionalist Account on Cognitive Ontologies. In: Dodig-Crnkovic, G., Giovagnoli, R. (eds) Representation and Reality in Humans, Other Living Organisms and Intelligent Machines. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 28. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43784-2_18

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