Preventing existence

• Proceedings of the International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS-2001)

We discuss the treatment of prevention statements in both natural language semantics and knowledge representation, with particular regard to existence entailments. First order representations with an explicit existence predicate are shown to not adequately capture the entailments of prevention statements. A linguistic analysis is framed in a higher order intensional logic, employing a Fregean notion of existence as instantiation of a concept. We discuss how this can be mapped to a Cyc style knowledge representation.

citation

Condoravdi, C. ; Crouch, R. S. ; Everett, J. O. ; de Paiva, V. ; Stolle, R. ; Bobrow, D. G. ; van den Berg, M. Preventing existence. Welty, C.; Smith, B., editors. Proceedings of the International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS-2001); 2001 October 17-19; Ogunquit; ME. NY: ACM Press; 2001; 162-173.