Ontology

 Artificial intelligence poses more insistently than ever the question concerning which categories we use in order to make relevant searches in a huge material. The introduction of consistent categories is a necessity in order to use in full the technical capacities of artificial intelligence to arrive at a deep understanding of phenomena, an understanding built mostly on correlations, and to make predictions based on this understanding.

To answer specific questions through an AI project, both a very specialised programming is necessary in order to take into account the categories of the project, and a system of pre-formulated categories, that is an ontology. This is a much more complex ensemble of tasks than what is usually believed. 

The categories of an ontology might or might not coincide with the conventional knowledge in a domain: as Lev Manovich has shown in Cultural analytics, some of art history's accepted truths turn out to be dubious when tested on an extensive material. The same would certainly apply to law, probably a little less to medicine.

The long-term goal of the present site is to present essays, both from the point of view of formulation of the content of categories in ontologies, and from the point of view of their technical application, and to publish the results of specific ontology projects

 As has been stated by e.g. Nicola Guarino, the technical and the content level are closely related. The present project aims at taking this into account.

Key words: ontology, Lev Manovich, categories, concepts, ontology of the humanities,  ontology of ideology, prediction, predictive analytics, Nicola Guarino

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The Ontology of Continuity

 The 15th of June 2025

Types of continuity of societies (and how they correlate if they do correlate)

1.       Symbolic continuity

a.       The position of literary immortality

b.       Is art seen as a continuity? Cf. Tarr (Wyndham Lewis)

c.       Transmission of knowledge. The symbols and structures of education.

2.       Familial continuity

a.       Transmission of symbols

b.       Transmission of property

c.       Transmission of knowledge

3.       Degrees of orality in society in general and in the educational system, the type of doctoral education, the importance of oral examination (cf 1.c transmission of knowledge)

4.       Industrial continuity

5.       Economic continuity in general (do industrial and financial continuity correlate? It does not seem like that if we take into consideration the contemporary world)

6.       Gender

a.       Are men or women culturally more or less associated with continuity?

7.       Pre-industrial family systems (what happens when the countries with a pre-industrial communitarian patriarchal family reach a high degree of education, reading capacity and, as a consequence, an ideological acme? This has never happened before).

Is Europe, compared to other parts of the world, deficient when it comes to the culture of continuity?

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Dictionary

20th of June 2025

Tarde, Gabriel (1843-1904)

The memetics movement begins in 1975 with Richard Dawkins asking the question about which are the smallest units of imitation which are transmitted. Gabriel Tarde asked the same question in the 1890s in his work The Laws of Imitation (Les lois de l’imitation). Gabriel Tarde also formulated the concept of the meme, without using the word meme. It is telling that Tarde is quoted by many of those who search for a deep structure which influences the surface of political and cultural events. He is, among others, quoted in an article by Susan Blackmore and Alan F.T. Winfield:

[2106.11754] Experiments in Artificial Culture: from noisy imitation to storytelling robots

There are certain personal links from the memeticist movement to today’s artificial intelligence world, among others through Douglas Hofstadter.

Ontologies, be it through AI or not, in the humanities are essentially a question about finding those small units of imitation. Emmanuel Todd, who works from the same perspective, but not in an AI context, also quotes Gabriel Tarde. It is, among others, a question about avoiding the ideas of big structures, like “the social” which do not seem to be able to be subsumed to correlating units, that is units which can be used in an ontology of the humanities and provide a basis for at least some predictions based on changes in the deep structure of society, that is the structure of the small units of imitation.

What Gabriel Tarde says about religion is a good characteristic also of ideology, it is much more a form than a specific content:

Assurément les mœurs, les sentiments moraux et les religions, qui consistent en imprégnations réciproques de manières d’être émus (my italics), l’emportent en ténacité sur les opinions et les principes mêmes.

Gabriel Tarde, Les lois de l’imitation (Ed. 1895) p. 214.