Category Archives: Ontology

Re: Ontolog Forum • Ravi Sharma In pursuing applications of pragmatic semiotics to scientific research the following distinctions are critical. We have the relational roles known as Object, Sign, and Interpretant Sign.  These are places or roles a thing may … Continue reading →

Re: Ontolog Forum • Ravi Sharma The words predicate, proposition, relation, and so on are affected by many variations in usage.  Some of their uses are associated with philosophical habits unlikely to change any time soon.  But there are a … Continue reading →

Re: Ontolog Forum • Ronald Stamper Concrete examples are very instructive in this arena, and when it comes to refutations a single counter-example serves to puncture many a fallacious general proposition. Here’s a couple of articles, illustrated with concrete examples of … Continue reading →

Re: Ontolog Forum • Ferenc Kovacs Our thoughts live in natural and artificial languages the way fish swim in natural and artificial bodies of water. One of the lessons most strikingly impressed on me by my first-year physics course and … Continue reading →

Re: Ontolog Forum • Joseph Simpson JS: A binary relation is a set of ordered pairs of the elements of some other set. That is the first definition I learned for binary relations. Slightly more generally, a binary relation is … Continue reading →

Re: Ontolog Forum • Joseph Simpson Just by way of clarifying and emphasizing a few points — I use the word relation to mean a special type of mathematical object, namely, a designated subset included within a cartesian product of sets. … Continue reading →

Re: Ontolog Forum • Ravi Sharma I chose those examples of triadic relations to be as simple as possible without being completely trivial but they already exemplify many features we need to keep in mind in all the more complex … Continue reading →

The middle ground between relations in general and the sign relations we need to do logic, inquiry, communication, and so on is occupied by triadic relations, also called ternary or 3‑place relations. Triadic relations are some of the most pervasive … Continue reading →

At the wide end of the funnel, here’s an introduction to relations in general, focusing on the discrete mathematical variety we find most useful in applications, for example, as background for relational data bases and empirical data. Relation Theory • OEIS Wiki … Continue reading →

I always have trouble deciding whether to start with the genus and drive down to the species or else to start with concrete examples and follow Sisyphus up Mt. Abstraction. Soon after I made my 3rd try at grad school, this … Continue reading →