We can hardly avoid seeing ourselves, society and the world from the standpoint of the manifest image, but at the same time we are more and more dependent on science and requested to also look at things from the standpoint of the scientific image.

Perceiving the two images as incompatible may then lead to cultural disorientation and existential uneasiness and end up being a cause of disregard or distrust toward commonsense or science or even both of them together.

These negative attitudes may well lurk behind unsound forms of behavior such as refusal of vaccinations, adherence to detrimental diets and therapies, inadequate responses to ecological and environmental problems, estrangement from public policies and democratic processes or participation to them with irrational choices.

We can help remove these attitudes via a better understanding of the two images leading to a deep-seated awareness of their compatibility. This is what we ultimately pursue.

The vision of science and commonsense that is meant to emerge from our project may thus have a positive cultural impact on the society at large. For it could help to promote a better appreciation of the value of science and an increased trust in its reliability, without however diminishing the value and importance of common sense.

Obviously, this impact cannot be an immediate consequence of the realization of the sophisticated philosophical goals outlined in the above fields, but can only come through an appropriate cultural dissemination of the leading ideas behind them: through public talks, newspaper articles, blogs, infotainment, which make science accessible to the general public, and especially formal education from kindergarten to high school and university.

Logic, mathematics, science and philosophy can be taught at all these levels in an integrated way that favors the viewpoint pursued in this project.

Note also that our goal to bridge the gap between the informal logic of everyday reasoning and formal logical systems, by uncovering which implicit principles of the former are made explicit in the latter, and how the apparent fallacies of the former may be better understood in the light of the latter, can be exploited for a more effective teaching of logic and critical thinking.

In sum, our project could constitute the philosophical basis for an educational project that should be of value not only in Italy but in Europe.

There are also potential applications in information technology.

The study of logical systems planned for goals G1c, G2c and G2b may of course be relevant for theorem proving in computer science. More specifically, the planned development of a theory of relations based on thematic roles should prove useful in the growing field of applied ontology.

An applied ontology codifies information in a formal language that is meant to be rigorous and unambiguous, for purposes of automated search and processing.

In building up an applied ontology one typically takes advantage of a “foundational” ontology with a large scope, adaptable to different modeling scenarios, and focusing on very general and basic concepts (object, event, quality, constitution, participation, dependence, parthood), which are not specific to particular domains but can be suitably refined to match different application requirements (Borgo and Masolo 2009).

There are several foundational ontologies on the market (http://www.loa-cnr.it/DOLCE.html; http://www.ifomis.org/bfo; http://www.onto-med.de/ontologies/gfo.html; http://www.opencyc.org; http://www.ontologyportal.org/), but all of them use some variant of the language of first-order logic.

Hence, they all convey relational information by exploiting the order with which the relata are introduced, on the basis of a convention decided on a case by case basis (“Lxy” could mean either “x loves y” or “y loves x,” depending on the chosen convention).

This results in idiosyncratic representations that jeopardize the generality of a foundational ontology.

A language based on the thematic roles that we plan to acknowledge by pursuing goal G1a could eliminate these idiosyncratic representations (e.g., “x loves y” would be represented as “L(agent(x), patient(y)”) and allow for more portable and efficient applications.

This would also be in line with the use of thematic roles in specific domains that some are beginning to consider (Goy et al. 2018).

References

Borgo S. & Masolo C. 2009, “Foundational Choices in DOLCE,” in S. Staab & R. Studer, Handbook on Applied Ontology, Springer.

Goy A. et al. 2018, “On the Role of Thematic Roles in a Historical Event Ontology,” Applied Ontology, 13: 19-39.