A Formal Theory of Substances, Qualities, and Universals

In Achille Varzi & Laure Vieu (eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems. Proceedings of the Third International Conference. IOS Press (2004)
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Abstract

One of the tasks of ontology in information science is to support the classification of entities according to their kinds and qualities. We hold that to realize this task as far as entities such as material objects are concerned we need to distinguish four kinds of entities: substance particulars, quality particulars, substance universals, and quality universals. These form, so to speak, an ontological square. We present a formal theory of classification based on this idea, including both a semantics for the theory and a provably sound axiomatization.

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Barry Smith
University at Buffalo

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