Meinongian Semantics and Artificial Intelligence
William J. Rapaport · PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation) · 2013
This essay describes computational semantic networks for a philosophical audience and surveys several approaches to semanticnetwork semantics.In particular, propositional semantic networks (exemplified by SNePS) are discussed; it is argued that only a fully intensional, Meinongian semantics is appropriate for them; and several Meinongian systems are presented. Meinong, Philosophy, and Artificial IntelligencePhilosophy was not kind to Meinong, the late-19th/early-20th-century cognitive scientist, until the 1970s renaissance in Meinong studies (Findlay, 1963;Grossmann, 1974;Rapaport, 1978; 1991b;Routley, 1979;Lambert, 1983;Schubert-Kalsi, 1987).Even so, his writings are often treated as curiosities (or worse) by mainstream philosophers.Meinong's contribution to philosophy can be characterized in terms of his thoroughgoing intensionalism.While some philosophers ridiculed or rejected this approach, some AI researchers -for largely independent, though closely related, reasonsargued for it.Here, I explore some of their arguments and show the relevance of Meinongian theories to research in AI.2. Semantic Networks Knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) is an area of AI concerned with systems for representing, storing, retrieving, and inferring information in cognitively adequate and computationally efficient ways.The represented