Approaching Roles with Affordances

Adrien Barton (1, 2, 2, 3) , Fumiaki Toyoshima (2, 2) , Jean-François Ethier (2, 2)

1 IRIT-MELODI - MEthodes et ingénierie des Langues, des Ontologies et du DIscours
2 UdeS - Université de Sherbrooke
3 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

We develop an affordance-based approach to a subkind of roles, namely roles that have a causal component and that involve an agent and an environment. This approach is based on a previous dispositional ontology of affordances and effectivities. More specifically, such roles are analyzed as identical to mereological sums of affordances or effectivities when they are realized. We illustrate this theory on the example of the roles of addresser (analyzed as a sum of effectivities when they are realized) and addressee (analyzed as a sum of affordances when they are realized). We discuss the import of this analysis for the category of role in the upper ontology Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), and the relation between this approach and Loebe's tripartition of roles.

Mots clés: affordance; disposition; realizable entity

Domaines: Philosophie; Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]

Adrien Barton, Fumiaki Toyoshima, Jean-François Ethier. Approaching Roles with Affordances. Workshop on Foundational Ontology (FOUST IV). The Joint Ontology Workshops 2020 (JOWO 2020), Sep 2020, Bolzano, Italy. ⟨hal-03039638⟩