[Gfo-users] GFO Presential/Persistent/Perpetuant

[Brandon Plewe]

This list doesn’t seem to have a lot of traffic, but I hope you experts can help a newbie make sense of some things in GFO. I am not a philosopher or a professional ontologist, just a domain person trying to select which FO to base my own work on. I like the philosophical underpinnings of GFO, but rejected it the first time around because the Presential/Persistant/Perpetuant solution to the problem of discriminating endurants and occurrents seemed overly complicated. After finding no better solutions, I’m coming back to GFO, but still a bit confused after my reading the foundational documents (GFO 1.0.1 and Herre 2010). It would be great if these were given some plain-spoken examples to help distinguish them.

 

Am I understanding this right (rephrased into my own words)?

-        Presential (Queen Elizabeth II) is the physical manifestation of her at a point in time, like (but not equal to) a picture, including her shape/boundary, characteristics, constituent molecules, etc.

-        Persistant (QE2) is like her identity or the social concept of her person, essentially a definition of what makes her unique, that she is a person/queen/woman/British, and the characteristics that would allow someone to recognize a presential as presential(QE2). My personal concept of “QE2” is a direct representation of this.

-        Perpetuant (QE2) is the actual person  (at the phenomenal level of reality at least) who is moving through time and space. If so, then these correlate most closely with the general concept of endurants.

-        To this can be added Process(QE2), her life/living.

 

If I am on the right track, then this distinction makes perfect sense. However, I am confused as to why the GFO documentation spends very little time talking about perpetuants, giving a half-sentence definition (and the undefined exhib function), but no real explanation or examples, even though they seem to be the most interesting and relevant thing to real life. It isn’t even in the OWL. Conversely, presentials are dealt with at length, and integrated with the rest of the ontology, even though they are arguably the least useful aspect of the three.

 

What I am looking for is a good formal definition that I can use to create a simple rubric to help normal people quickly determine whether an individual is a process/occurrent or an endurant/P/P/P. In all the top-level ontologies (DOLCE, SUMO, BFO, etc.) and all of the philosophical literature I have been through so far, the definitions (endurants have no temporal parts, endurants are “whole” at t) are never defined in formal logic (BFO’s definition is circular!), and generally discussed with a lot of hand-waving (“isn’t it obvious?”). Well, it turns out that in my domain (geography), there are a lot of cases that are far from obvious.

 

I’m hoping that there is other GFO-based literature out there that fleshes this out further. Any hints?

 

Thank you,

 

Brandon Plewe