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Formal Ontology and Conceptual RealismTime, Being, and Existence

Formal Ontology and Conceptual Realism: Time, Being, and Existence Chapter 2 One criterion of adequacy for a formal ontology, we have said, is that it should provide a logically perspicuous representation of our commonsense understand- ing of the world, and not just of our scientific understanding. Now a central feature of our commonsense understanding is how we are conceptually oriented in time with respect to the past, the present and the future, and the question arises as to how we can best represent this orientation. It is inappropriate to represent it in terms of a tenseless idiom of moments or intervals of time of a coordinate system, as is commonly done in scientific theories; for that amounts to replacing our commonsense understanding with a scientific view. A more appropriate representation is one that respects the form and content of our commonsense speech and mental acts about the past, the present and the fu- ture. Formally, this can best be done in terms of a logic of tense operators, or in what is now called tense logic. The most natural formal ontology for tense logic is conceptual realism. That is because what tense operators represent in conceptual realism are certain cog- nitive schemata regarding our orientation in time and http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Formal Ontology and Conceptual RealismTime, Being, and Existence

Part of the Synthese Library Book Series (volume 339)
Cocchiarella, Nino B.
Formal Ontology and Conceptual Realism — Jan 1, 2007
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Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Copyright
© springer 2007
ISBN
978-1-4020-6203-2
Pages
25 –58
DOI
10.1007/978-1-4020-6204-9_2
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

Chapter 2 One criterion of adequacy for a formal ontology, we have said, is that it should provide a logically perspicuous representation of our commonsense understand- ing of the world, and not just of our scientific understanding. Now a central feature of our commonsense understanding is how we are conceptually oriented in time with respect to the past, the present and the future, and the question arises as to how we can best represent this orientation. It is inappropriate to represent it in terms of a tenseless idiom of moments or intervals of time of a coordinate system, as is commonly done in scientific theories; for that amounts to replacing our commonsense understanding with a scientific view. A more appropriate representation is one that respects the form and content of our commonsense speech and mental acts about the past, the present and the fu- ture. Formally, this can best be done in terms of a logic of tense operators, or in what is now called tense logic. The most natural formal ontology for tense logic is conceptual realism. That is because what tense operators represent in conceptual realism are certain cog- nitive schemata regarding our orientation in time and

Published: Jan 1, 2007

Keywords: Local Time; Modal Logic; Tense Operator; Formal Ontology; Tense Logic

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