Johanna Seibt - Modes of occurrence and modes of being in process ontology: toward crosslinguistic frames

Current ontological research in analytical philosophy and in computer science to a large extent is still driven by theoretical presuppositions taken over from the substance-ontological tradition. In the first part of my talk I will briefly draw attention to a network of theoretical presuppositions characteristic of the “substance paradigm” of ontological category construction. Historical accounts of substance differ widely, but they can be associated with maximal consistent subsets of presuppositions constituting the substance paradigm. The core elements of the substance paradigm generate an ontological bias in favor of ‘object-like’ individuals, i.e., of basic entities that are particular (uniquely located), discrete, and fully determinate (thus also ‘static’). The traditional bias in favor of object-like individuals seems to reflect, in problematic ways, the prevalence of sortal nouns in European languages. From the point of view of linguistic typology, sortal nouns are but one of several strategies of coding the occurrence of spatio-temporally bounded features, and in terms of language distribution a rather parochial affair. In the second part of my talk I introduce General Process Theory (GPT), an ontological framework that leaves the strictures of the substance paradigm behind. The basic entities of GPT, called “general processes”, are ‘activity-like’ individuals or concrete ‘subjectless’ dynamics (as expressed, for example, in statements like It is snowing). General processes are non-particular (possibly multiply located), non-discrete, and indeterminate (schematic and ‘dynamic’). General processes stand in part-whole relations, primarily the relation ‘is a functional part of’, and are individuated in terms of their (context-relative) partitions. As I will show, GPT can be used to define denotations of nouns (‘noun phrases’) and predicates (‘verb phrases’) from a typological (cross-linguistic) point of view. According to Rijkhoff’s (2002) classification of types of nouns in the world’s languages, nouns express one of six ways of a feature’s occurrence in space (“Seinsarten”), just as verbs express one of four ways of a feature’s occurrence in time (Aktionsarten). I define Seinsarten (modes of being) and Aktionsarten (modes of occurrence) inferentially and show that nouns and verbs of a certain Seinsart or Aktionsart, respectively, can be taken to denote general processes with certain mereological characteristics relating to spatiotemporal organization. In the third part of my talk I consider how these and other distinctions in the spatiotemporal and functional organization of concrete dynamics as formulated in GPT relate to Barsalou’s account of perceptual knowledge. Even if frames are represented as so-called “attribute-value” structures, the information encoded in frames can be described in many different ontologies, even those without substances and attributes. A GPT-based interpretation of what frames represent appears to be particularly useful for the analysis of functional concepts operating as “attributes” in frames.