Charting Possible Worlds: The Quest for Meaning in Ontologies
Adrien Barton, Paul Fabry, Jean‐François Éthier · Frontiers in artificial intelligence and applications · 2025
We explore the concept of meaning in applied ontologies using possible world semantics. We begin by analyzing the nature of possible worlds in the influential framework proposed by Guarino, Oberle and Staab: interpreting an ontology involves selecting, from the set of logically possible worlds, a subset of worlds that are metaphysically possible according to the ontology – ideally corresponding to the set of worlds that are metaphysically possible according to the ontology’s creator. We argue that this framework is limited to analytic statements and should be extended to encompass synthetic statements. The analytic/synthetic distinction, we suggest, can itself be understood in terms of the necessary/contingent distinction using metaphysically possible worlds. We propose a dual framework for introducing terms in ontology development, integrating both descriptivism and Kripke’s theory of rigid designators. This framework accommodates a posteriori analytic statements, implying that the meaning of a term may be unknown even to its creator. Finally, we distinguish two distinct roles that labels can play in ontology development: either as rigid designators that carry semantic weight, or as mere human-readable tags serving as proxies for underlying descriptions.