BFO-ontology/BFO

Common/Proper Nouns vs Universals/Particulars

Opened this issue · 5 comments

nordlow commented

Are BFO's concepts "universal" and "particular" different from (WordNet's) "common noun" and "proper noun". If so, how do they differ? If not, why didn't BFO simply pick those instead? Use http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn to check meaning of a concept in WordNet.

ngrewe commented

Are BFO's concepts "universal" and "particular" different from (WordNet's) "common noun" and "proper noun".

Yes. They are quite different.

how do they differ?

The terms ‘common noun’ and ‘proper noun’ refer to entities in the linguistic domain, while the terms ‘universal’ and ‘particular’ refer to the entities in the world themselves, which is what BFO is trying to model. We very often use common nouns to talk about universals and proper nouns to talk about particulars (i.e. instances of universals), but they aren't referring to the same kind of thing. For example: The proper noun ‘European Union’ is made up of 14 characters, while the particular entity European Union is not made up of characters at all.

With regards to this issue, the reference documentation points to the following papers:

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-222/krmed2006-p07.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3104413/

I hope that helps.

Niels

nordlow commented

I still can't get my head around this. Can you give an example of a universal that is not a proper noun?

ngrewe commented

Since no universal is (identical to) a noun, it's seems easier to flip the question around: Are there common nouns which do not refer to universals? The answer is "yes" : "unicorn" or "phlogiston" clearly are nouns with a specifiable meaning, but no such things exist, so there are no corresponding universals.

nordlow commented

Ahh, ok. So a BFO universal is the same as a concrete common noun?

ngrewe commented

So a BFO universal is the same as a concrete common noun?

No, sorry for the misleading example. There's no overlap between nouns and universals (unless you're operating in the confines of the ontology of linguistics, perhaps). At best, there can be the relation of reference between them. Putting it bluntly: nouns are just names for things. It is absolutely crucial not to confuse the things you want to talk about (universals) with the means employed when talking about them (nouns).

So let me try again: An example for an universal that is not a noun would be cat. (I'm using italics to indicate that I'm refering to an universal using this). Note that there is in fact also a word "cat" (which I have to enclose in quotation marks here to make clear that I'm just mentioning the word, and not using it). But the word is not the same as the universal. They're quite different:

The word "cat"

  • Is a word of the English language
  • has two consonants and one vowel
  • can be translated into French as "chat"
  • new instances are created by writting the characters next to each other or uttering the corresponding sounds

The entity cat

  • is a mammal
  • has a brain and a heart
  • can be domesticated
  • new instances arise from the procreation of existing female and male cats

The word "cat" cannot be domesticated and the universal cat cannot be translated into French. And most importantly, I cannot create new cats just by uttering the word "cat"!