Barry, (01)
In NL formal semantics, there is formally distinctions made between
plurals (with distributed or collective interpretations: three bananas,
John and is friends, many girls; and sometimes so-called cumulative
readings, which I won't go into), singular group-denoting nouns usually
called collectives (team, family, committee, nation, etc.), and groups
(entities more than the sum of their parts), and sometimes higher-order
groups (groups of groups). Also included in these analyses is the
distinction between mass and count nouns. (02)
In some analyses there are no ontological distinctions between the
denotations of singular terms and plural terms (Scha, 1981)[4]: they
are in the same domain. The domain comes with a part-of operator
(plural individuals have singular individual parts) or a sum operator
(plural individuals are sums of singular individuals), where "the boys"
denotes a plural individual that is the sum of the singular boys. Or
both [3]. (03)
Link (1983)[3] and Landman (1989)[1, 2], among others discuss these
issues. (04)
I poked around a bit and found this Philosophy of Language course [5]
site that has a good overview of these issues: (05)
Plural and mass descriptions
http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/phil633/Descriptions%2012.pdf.
Followed by Groups and Qualifications:
http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/phil633/Descriptions%2013.pdf. (06)
The Landman papers are obtainable from the above. (07)
So it seems that your distinction between class and type is perhaps not
quite right. If you mean by this the necessity for both intension and
extension, then of course I agree. However, can't you talk about the
description and the things that satisfy the description? (08)
In OWL FULL the distinction is made between class, instance, and class
as an instance (so class as both characterizing a description, an
extensional "class", and a class which is an instance maybe comparable
to the plural individual mentioned above -- which might satisfy the
species rabbit example, no? (09)
Thanks,
Leo (010)
[1] Fred Landman, 'Groups I' Lingutics and Philosophy (1989) 12: 559 -
605.
[2] Fred Landman, 'Groups II' Lingutics and Philosophy (1989) 12: 723 -
744.
[3] Godehard Link, 'The Logical Analysis of Plural and Mass Terms: A
Lattice-Theoretical Approach', in Rainer Bäuerle, Christoph Schwarze,
and Arnim von Stechow, eds., Meaning, Use and Interpretation of
Language, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983), pp. 302-323.
[4] Remko Scha, 'Distributive, Collective and Cumulative
Quantification', in Jeroen Groenendijk, Theo Janssen, and Martin
Stokhof, eds., Formal Methods in the Study of Language. Proceedings of
the Third Amsterdam Colloquium, (Amsterdam: Matematisch Centrum, 1981),
pp. 483-512. 41.
Philosophy 633:Philosophy of Language
[5] Professor Zoltán Gendler Szabó. Descriptions. Cornell University,
Fall 2005. http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/phil633/. (011)
_____________________________________________
Dr. Leo Obrst The MITRE Corporation, Information Semantics
lobrst@xxxxxxxxx Center for Innovative Computing & Informatics
Voice: 703-983-6770 7515 Colshire Drive, M/S H305
Fax: 703-983-1379 McLean, VA 22102-7508, USA (012)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontac-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontac-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Smith, Barry
Sent: Saturday, January 21, 2006 3:10 PM
To: ONTAC Taxonomy-Ontology Development Discussion
Subject: RE: [ontac-dev] Type vs. Class -- Please vote (013)
>MW: From where I sit a class/set/type/category
>(the longer the concatenation the quicker people will want to pick one
>and the less they will care which) has a number of instances and a
number
>of axioms, and there is no need for two objects (e.g. class and type)
any
>more than a person needs to be two objects because it has arms and
legs. (014)
A type has a number of instances which together form a class.
A football team has a number of members which together form a set.
The set can change, as members join and leave, but the football team
remains identical.
Thus the set and the team are not identical. (015)
>MW: I accept of course that there is the trivial restriction class of
>"instances of X" which can be derived from the instance_of relation,
but
>that is entirely redundant as far as I can see.
>
>MW: Please explain my error. (016)
See above. And generalize to, say, the species rabbit.
BS (017)
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