VegeDog: Formalism, Vegetarian Dogs, and Partonomies in Transition

Authors

  • E. Nissan
  • S. E. Shimony

Abstract

The pragmatics of 'vegetarian' and 'carnivorous' exhibits an asymmetry that we put in evidence by analyzing a newspaper  report about vegetarian dog-owners imposing a vegetarian diet on their pets. More fundamental is the problem of partonomy versus containment, for which we attempt a naive but formal analysis applied to ingestion and the food chain, an issue we derive from the same text analyzed. Our formal tools belong in commonsense modelling, a domain of artificial intelligence related to extra-linguistic knowledge and pragmatics. We first provide an interpretation of events analyzed, and express it graphically in a semantic-network related representation, and propose an alternative that we express in terms of a modal logic, avoiding the full representational power of Hayes's "ontology for liquids".

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Published

2012-03-05

How to Cite

Nissan, E., & Shimony, S. E. (2012). VegeDog: Formalism, Vegetarian Dogs, and Partonomies in Transition. Computing and Informatics, 16(1), 79–104. Retrieved from http://147.213.75.17/ojs/index.php/cai/article/view/676