Concepts are defined as abstract ideas. They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks of the concept behind principles, thoughts and beliefs. They play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied by several disciplines, such as linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, and these disciplines are interested in the logical and psychological structure of concepts, and how they are put together to form thoughts and sentences. The study of concepts has served as an important flagship of an emerging interdisciplinary approach called cognitive science.
Ontology is the branch of philosophy that studies concepts such as existence, being, becoming, and reality. It includes the questions of how entities are grouped into basic categories and which of these entities exist on the most fundamental level. Ontology is sometimes referred to as the science of being and belongs to the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics.
The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language.
Social epistemology refers to a broad set of approaches that can be taken in epistemology that construes human knowledge as a collective achievement. Another way of characterizing social epistemology is as the evaluation of the social dimensions of knowledge or information.
Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century". From 1930 until his death 70 years later, Quine was continually affiliated with Harvard University in one way or another, first as a student, then as a professor. He filled the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard from 1956 to 1978.
Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to objectivity within a particular domain and assert that valuations in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed. There are many different forms of relativism, with a great deal of variation in scope and differing degrees of controversy among them. Moral relativism encompasses the differences in moral judgments among people and cultures. Epistemic relativism holds that there are no absolute principles regarding normative belief, justification, or rationality, and that there are only relative ones. Alethic relativism is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e., that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as a language or a culture. Some forms of relativism also bear a resemblance to philosophical skepticism. Descriptive relativism seeks to describe the differences among cultures and people without evaluation, while normative relativism evaluates the morality or truthfulness of views within a given framework.
In computer science and information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definition of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, and entities that substantiate one, many, or all domains of discourse. More simply, an ontology is a way of showing the properties of a subject area and how they are related, by defining a set of concepts and categories that represent the subject.
Hilary Whitehall Putnam was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. Outside philosophy, Putnam contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem.
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that considers words and thought as tools and instruments for prediction, problem solving, and action, and rejects the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality. Pragmatists contend that most philosophical topics—such as the nature of knowledge, language, concepts, meaning, belief, and science—are all best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes.
20th-century philosophy saw the development of a number of new philosophical schools—including logical positivism, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, and poststructuralism. In terms of the eras of philosophy, it is usually labelled as contemporary philosophy.
Naturalized epistemology is a collection of philosophic views concerned with the theory of knowledge that emphasize the role of natural scientific methods. This shared emphasis on scientific methods of studying knowledge shifts focus to the empirical processes of knowledge acquisition and away from many traditional philosophical questions. There are noteworthy distinctions within naturalized epistemology. Replacement naturalism maintains that traditional epistemology should be abandoned and replaced with the methodologies of the natural sciences. The general thesis of cooperative naturalism is that traditional epistemology can benefit in its inquiry by using the knowledge we have gained from the cognitive sciences. Substantive naturalism focuses on an asserted equality of facts of knowledge and natural facts.
Neopragmatism, sometimes called post-Deweyan pragmatism, linguistic pragmatism, or analytic pragmatism, is the philosophical tradition that infers that the meaning of words is a result of how they are used, rather than the objects they represent.
Joseph Zalman Margolis was an American philosopher. A radical historicist, he authored many books critical of the central assumptions of Western philosophy, and elaborated a robust form of relativism.
Meta-ontology is the study of the field of inquiry known as Ontology. The goal of meta-ontology is to clarify what ontology is about and how to interpret the meaning of ontological claims. Different meta-ontological theories disagree on what the goal of ontology is and whether a given issue or theory lies within the scope of ontology. There is no universal agreement whether meta-ontology is a separate field of inquiry besides ontology or whether it is just one branch of ontology.
In philosophy, objectivity is the concept of truth independent from individual subjectivity. A proposition is considered to have objective truth when its truth conditions are met without bias caused by a sentient subject. Scientific objectivity refers to the ability to judge without partiality or external influence. Objectivity in the moral framework calls for moral codes to be assessed based on the well-being of the people in the society that follow it. Moral objectivity also calls for moral codes to be compared to one another through a set of universal facts and not through subjectivity.
Eli Hirsch is an American philosopher and the Charles Goldman Professor of Philosophy at Brandeis University.
Maria Baghramian is an Irish philosopher who is the Professor of American Philosophy in the School of Philosophy, University College Dublin (UCD). She was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) in 2010 and a member of the RIA Council from 2015 to 2018. Baghramian has published ten authored and edited books as well as articles and book chapters on topics in epistemology and twentieth century American Philosophy. She was the Chief Editor of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies (IJPS) from 2003 to 2013.
In information science a conceptualization is an abstract simplified view of some selected part of the world, containing the objects, concepts, and other entities that are presumed of interest for some particular purpose and the relationships between them. An explicit specification of a conceptualization is an ontology, and it may occur that a conceptualization can be realized by several distinct ontologies. An ontological commitment in describing ontological comparisons is taken to refer to that subset of elements of an ontology shared with all the others. "An ontology is language-dependent", its objects and interrelations described within the language it uses, while a conceptualization is always the same, more general, its concepts existing "independently of the language used to describe it". The relation between these terms is shown in the figure to the right.
The internal–external distinction is a distinction used in philosophy to divide an ontology into two parts: an internal part consisting of a linguistic framework and observations related to that framework, and an external part concerning practical questions about the utility of that framework. This division was introduced by Rudolf Carnap in his work "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology". It was subsequently criticized at length by Willard Van Orman Quine in a number of works, and was considered for some time to have been discredited. However, recently a number of authors have come to the support of some or another version of Carnap's approach.
The term quantifier variance refers to claims that there is no uniquely best ontological language with which to describe the world. The term "quantifier variance" rests upon the philosophical term 'quantifier', more precisely existential quantifier. A 'quantifier' is an expression like "there exists at least one ‘such-and-such’". Quantifier variance then is the thesis that the meaning of quantifiers is ambiguous. This thesis can be used to explain how some disputes in ontology are only due to a failure of the disagreeing parties to agree on the meaning of the quantifiers used.
