Abstract
In the concluding remarks of Ontological Promiscuity Hobbs (1985) made what we believe to be a very insightful observation: given that semantics is an attempt at specifying the relation between language and the world, if "one can assume a theory of the world that is isomorphic to the way we talk about it ... then semantics becomes nearly trivial". But how exactly can we rectify our logical formalisms so that semantics, an endeavor that has occupied the most penetrating minds for over two centuries, can become (nearly) trivial, and what exactly does it mean to assume a theory of the world in our semantics? In this paper we hope to provide answers for both questions. First, we believe that a commonsense theory of the world can (and should) be embedded in our semantic formalisms resulting in a logical semantics grounded in commonsense metaphysics. Moreover, we believe the first step to accomplishing this vision is rectifying what we think was a crucial oversight in logical semantics, namely the failure to distinguish between two fundamentally different types of concepts: (i) ontological concepts, that correspond to what Cocchiarella (2001) calls first-intension concepts and are types in a strongly-typed ontology; and (ii) logical concepts (or second intension concepts), that are predicates corresponding to properties of (and relations between) objects of various ontological types1. In such a framework, which we will refer to henceforth by ontologik, it will be shown how type unification and other type operations can be used to account for the `missing text phenomenon' (MTP) (see Saba, 2019a) that is at the heart of most challenges in the semantics of natural language, by uncovering the significant amount of missing text that is never explicitly stated in everyday discourse, but is often implicitly assumed as shared background knowledge.
Abstract (translated)
霍布斯（1985）在《本体论滥交的结论性评论》中提出了我们认为是一个非常有洞察力的观点：鉴于语义学是一种试图指明语言和世界之间关系的尝试，如果“一个人可以假设一个与我们谈论它的方式同构的世界理论……然后语义变得几乎微不足道。但是，我们如何准确地纠正我们的逻辑形式主义，使语义学，一种占据了两个多世纪以来最敏锐思想的努力，可以变得（几乎）微不足道，而在我们的语义学中假定一个世界理论究竟意味着什么呢？在本文中，我们希望为这两个问题提供答案。首先，我们认为一个世界常识理论可以（也应该）嵌入我们的语义形式主义中，从而产生一个以常识形而上学为基础的逻辑语义。此外，我们认为，实现这一愿景的第一步是纠正我们认为对逻辑语义学至关重要的监督，即未能区分两种根本不同类型的概念：（i）本体论概念，与Cocchiarella（2001）所称的第一内涵概念相对应，是一种强类型本体论；（ii）逻辑概念（或第二内涵概念），是与各种本体类型的对象的属性（以及对象之间的关系）相对应的谓词1。在这样一个框架中，我们将在今后的本体论中提到，它将展示如何使用类型统一和其他类型操作来解释“丢失文本现象”（MTP）（见SABA，2019A），这是自然语言语义中大多数挑战的核心，通过发现大量丢失的文本在日常话语中从未明确表述，但通常被隐含地假定为共享的背景知识。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.06779
