Gustav Bergmann, New foundations of ontology

Barry Smith

pp. 304-306

in: Werner Depauli Schimanovich, Eckehart Köhler, Friedrich Stadler (eds), The foundational debate, Berlin, Springer, 1995

Abstract

The formal ontology here presented is what we might call a typed combinatorial Meinongian mereology. Its author seeks to formulate the laws, here called "canons', regulating how entities can combine together in wholes of different sorts. The method, as in Bergmann's earlier works, involves the construction of an ideal language of such a sort that the analysis of complex wholes can be achieved by transforming our natural-language representations of reality into what we might think of as artificial characteristic maps or diagrams which allow the relevant ontological structures to be read off immediately from the symbolic representations which results. In former works Bergmann had held that the symbolic language of Principia Mathematica could serve as the appropriate diagrammatic device for the standard first-order functional calculus and develops instead a new sort diagrammatic language (though one which, as I have argued elsewhere, is still not fully adequate for the purposes in hand¹)

Cited authors

Bergmann Gustav