Concept
Ontological commitment
Overview
In formal semantics, an ontological commitment of a language is one or more objects postulated to exist by that language. The 'existence' referred to need not be 'real', but exist only in a universe of discourse. As an example, legal systems use vocabulary referring to 'legal persons' that are collective entities that have rights. One says the legal doctrine has an ontological commitment to non-singular individuals.
In information systems and artificial intelligence, where an ontology refers to a specific vocabulary and a set of explicit assumptions about the meaning and usage of these words, an ontological commitment is an agreement to use the shared vocabulary in a coherent and consistent manner within a specific context.
In philosophy, a "theory is ontologically committed to an object only if that object occurs in all the ontologies of that theory."
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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The connection between the spoken word and the word as it reaches the hearer is causal. Let us confine ourselves to the spoken word, which is the more important for the analysis of what is called "thought." Then we may say that a single instance of the spoken word consists of a series of movements, and the word consists of a whole set of such series, each member of the set being very similar to each other member…
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
States what Ontological commitment is; the author is tied to Ontological commitment in the knowledge graph.
It may be said to be, at once, both what the logicians call, a singular, and what they call, a common term; and to join, in its signification the seemingly opposite qualities of the most precise individuality and the most extensive generalization. This word, therefore, expressing so very abstract and metaphysical an idea, would not easily or readily occur to the first formers of language. What are called the…
Adam Smith, The Essays of Adam Smith
States what Ontological commitment is.
A proposition of this sort, however, conveys no information to any one who previously understood the whole meaning of the terms. The propositions, Every man is a corporeal being, Every man is a living creature, Every man is rational, convey no knowledge to any one who was already aware of the entire meaning of the word _man_, for the meaning of the word includes all this: and that every _man_ has the attributes…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
States what Ontological commitment is.
Philosophers who discussed Ontological commitment
Related ideas
- First-order logic
- Artificial intelligence
- G. E. Moore
- Philosophy
- If and only if
- Language
- Predicate (grammar)
- Mathematics
- Explanatory power
- Ontology
- Set (mathematics)
- Formal semantics (natural language)
- Universalism
- Willard Van Orman Quine
- Second-order logic
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Occam's razor
- Bertrand Russell
- Quantifier (logic)
- Abstract and concrete
- Napoleon
- Existential quantification
- Epistemology
- Axiom
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Analytic philosophy.