Tense Logic and Ontology of Time (original) (raw)
2021, Proceedings of the Joint Ontology Workshops 2021 Episode VII: The Bolzano Summer of Knowledge co-located with the 12th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2021), and the 12th International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (ICBO 2021)
This work aims to make tense logic a more robust tool for ontologists, philosophers, knowledge engineers and programmers by outlining a fusion of tense logic and ontology of time. In order to make tense logic better understandable, the central formal primitives of standard tense logic are derived as theorems from an informal and intuitive ontology of time. In order to make formulation of temporal propositions easier, temporal operators that were introduced by Georg Henrik von Wright are developed, and mapped to the ontology of time.
Related papers
A Priorean Approach to Time Ontologies
2004
Any non-trivial top-level ontology should take temporal notions into account. The details of how this should be done, however, are frequently debated. In this paper it is argued that “the four grades of tense-logical involvement” suggested by A.N. Prior form a useful framework for discussing how various temporal notions are related in a top-level ontology. Furthermore, a number of modern ontologies are analysed with respect to their incorporation of temporal notions. It is argued that all of them correspond to Prior’s first and second grade, and that none of them reflect the views which Prior’s third and fourth grade represent. Finally, the paper deals with Prior’s ideas on a tensed ontology and it is argued that a logic based on the third grade and will be useful in the further development of tensed ontology.
Temporal Ontology in Perspective
2017
Do non-present things exist? A number of authors have argued that this question lacks substance in that the rival temporal ontologies—Presentism (non-present things don’t exist) and Eternalism (non-present things exist)— are not properly distinct, and so temporal ontology faces a problem of triviality. The debate has centred on the tense of ‘exists’ and the indexicality of ‘is present’. I show that this needn’t be the case: firstly, one can provide nonindexical criteria of ontological commitment for the di erent temporal ontologies; secondly the resulting formulations of the temporal ontologies are distinguished in terms of their observer-independent, non-indexical structure, showing that triviality is avoided at the level of ontological commitment by removing indexicals. I demonstrate how the resulting account of temporal ontologies relates to standard accounts, and how the resulting account of presentism avoids conceptual problems standardly raised against accounts of presentism. ...
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.
Related papers
Other Times: Philosophical perspectives on past, present and future, 1997