Francesco Franda

Declos and Grandjean (2025) have introduced Mereological Anti-Conservatism as a new answer to the Special Composition Question. According to this view, extraordinary composite objects like fusions of trouts and turkeys exist, whereas ordinary objects like trouts and turkeys do not. Their aim is not to defend this bizarre ontology but to argue that it is, surprisingly, more plausible than Conservatism, according to which only ordinary composites exist. They claim that Anti-Conservatism avoids the problems of vagueness, change, and common sense that afflict Conservatism, and that, modally, it is more epistemically inclusive, counting more possible worlds as ontologically correct. I argue that this comparative assessment fails: the view’s alleged advantages concerning vagueness, change, and common sense do not hold, and the modal argument they advance rests on a faulty assumption about infinite cardinalities and an uneven application of evaluative criteria.

Proponents of technical monism argue that artistic functions are technical functions, and that therefore artworks and technical artifacts may be unified under the same theoretical framework. We hold that this view fails because it does not account for the phenomenon of technical malfunction: if artistic functions were technical functions, then artistic malfunctions would be technical malfunctions too. We argue that artistic malfunctions are not technical malfunctions because they cannot meet all the following four criteria: (1) malfunctioning attribution to a technical artifact entails negative evaluation and a reason to avoid use; (2) technical malfunction is caused by a failure of the artifact itself rather than failing circumstances; (3) a malfunctioning technical artifact remains a member of its artifactual kind; (4) malfunctioning technical artifacts are sometimes repaired. Since artistic malfunction cannot meet all these conditions, we claim that artworks and technical artifacts do not share the same type of function and, as such, unification theories based on technical function are untenable. We conclude by suggesting that our account raises broader challenges not only for technical-function-based unification theories, but also for other theories that seek to unify artworks and technical artifacts through a shared notion of function, as well as for accounts of artifact function more broadly.

The explosion of interest in large language models (LLMs) has been accompanied by concerns over the extent to which generated outputs can be trusted, owing to the prevalence of bias, hallucinations, and so forth. Accordingly, there is a growing interest in the use of ontologies and knowledge graphs to make LLMs more trustworthy. This rests on the long history of ontologies and knowledge graphs in constructing human-comprehensible justification for model outputs as well as traceability concerning the impact of evidence on other evidence. Understanding the nature of arguments and argumentation is critical to each, especially when LLM output conflicts with what is expected by users. The central contribution of this article is to extend the Arguments Ontology (ARGO) - an ontology specific to the domain of argumentation and evidence broadly construed - into the space of LLM fact-checking in the interest of promoting justification and traceability research through the use of ARGO-based ‘blueprints’.

Although the last decade has seen a proliferation of ontological approaches to arguments, many of them employ ad hoc solutions to representing arguments, lack interoperability with other ontologies, or cover arguments only as part of a broader approach to evidence. To provide a better ontological representation of arguments, we present the Arguments Ontology (ArgO), a small ontology for arguments that is designed to be imported and easily extended by researchers who work in different upper-level ontology frameworks, different logics, and different approaches to argument evaluation. Unlike most ontological approaches to arguments, ArgO utilizes Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as an upper-level ontology, and may be used alongside other commonly used ontologies in the BFO framework, including boththe Information Artifact Ontology (IAO), and the Information Entity Ontology (INFO). Critically, our proposal is principled, based on rigorous definitions and formal axioms out of which characterizations of arguments naturally fall. It is our hope that ArgO may assist researchers in many projects, including: integrating heterogeneous sources of evidence, structuring the content of semantic wikis, and enhancing semantic reasoning.

This dialogue, taking place between Prof. Whether and Prof. What, focuses on the nature of the relationship between ontology, conceived as the branch of philosophy concerned with the question of _what entities exist_, and metaphysics, conceived as the complementary part of philosophy that seeks to explain, of those entities, _what they are_. Most philosophers claim that it is not possible to address the first question without at the same time addressing the second, since knowing whether an entity exists requires knowing what that entity is. Prof. Whether argues against this popular position and offers a detailed analysis of the idea according to which it is possible to do ontology without engaging in metaphysics. Prof. Whether and Prof. What agree that, rather than being merely possible, in some cases it is, for methodological reasons, even preferable to start with a metaphysics-free ontology, postponing any inquiry concerning the nature of the entities included in the ontological inventory to a later stage. However, Prof. What notes that it is not always possible to do ontology without metaphysics, because there are certain kinds of entities, such as universals and possible worlds, that necessarily need a prior metaphysical characterization.

This is a dissertation in social ontology, whose goal is to defend a constructivist account of social kinds. First, I show how there is no fully satisfactory characterization or definition of the social, but that we can rely on an intuitive understanding on which entities count as social entities. Second, I clarify what I mean by ‘social category’ or ‘social kind,’ which I define as a partition of entities that bear and share certain social properties. Third, I argue against what I call ‘Natural Boundaries Realism,’ the view according to which there are at least some social kinds that are not constructed. Fourth, I develop my constructivist account, claiming that social kinds are concepts, and showing several ways in which they are created. Fifth, I argue that social kinds may be natural kinds, and that the Stable Property Cluster account of natural kinds is the one that best accommodates the existence of social kinds that are also natural kinds. Finally, I show how values may play a role in the making of social kinds, and how my constructive account accommodates these normative inputs.

In this paper, I argue against what I call “natural realism” about social kinds, the view according to which social categories have natural boundaries, independent of our thought. First, I draw a distinction between two different types of entity realism, one being about the existence of the entity, “ontological realism”, and the other one being about the direct mind-independence of the entity, “natural realism”. After endorsing ontological realism, I present the natural realist argument according to which there would be certain social kinds, such as economic recessions and racism, even if we had no clue about their existence and nature. I claim that the argument fails insofar it mistakes the single instances for the kinds themselves. I then argue against natural realism by showing how the vagueness characterizing the boundaries of social kinds puts the realist in front of a dilemma: either she accepts the vagueness of these boundaries as ontic, a metaphysically problematic thesis, or she accepts that most or all social kinds remain unknown, an epistemologically problematic thesis. Thus, I argue that antirealism, according to which social kinds are constructed, is a better alternative to the realist account.

Background: Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine—Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT, hereafter abbreviated SCT) is a comprehensive medical terminology used for standardizing the storage, retrieval, and exchange of electronic health data. Some efforts have been made to capture the contents of SCT as Web Ontology Language (OWL), but these efforts have been hampered by the size and complexity of SCT. Method: Our proposal here is to develop an upper-level ontology and to use it as the basis for defining the terms in SCT in a way that will support quality assurance of SCT, for example, by allowing consistency checks of definitions and the identification and elimination of redundancies in the SCT vocabulary. Our proposed upper-level SCT ontology (SCTO) is based on the Ontology for General Medical Science (OGMS). Results: The SCTO is implemented in OWL 2, to support automatic inference and consistency checking. The approach will allow integration of SCT data with data annotated using Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry ontologies, since the use of OGMS will ensure consistency with the Basic Formal Ontology, which is the top-level ontology of the OBO Foundry. Currently, the SCTO contains 304 classes, 28 properties, 2400 axioms, and 1555 annotations. It is publicly available through the bioportal. Conclusion: The resulting ontology can enhance the semantics of clinical decision support systems and semantic interoperability among distributed electronic health records. In addition, the populated ontology can be used for the automation of mobile health applications.

In this paper, I tackle the problem of diachronic identity. Far from providing a criterion for identity over time, the aim of this work is to understand if this issue pertains to ontology, conceived as that part of philosophy that tries to answer the question about what entities exist, or metaphysics, conceived as that part of philosophy that tries to explain, of those entities, what they are. On the face of it, only metaphysics has the task to solve this problem, but I argue that this is false. Through the analysis of different theories concerning identity through time, I show how both ontology and metaphysics are concerned with the problem of diachronic identity, and how actually ontology turns out to be primary in solving the problem.