Polyphony: An ontology for representing epistemic disagreements

Polyphony is an ontology for representing epistemic disagreements in Semantic Web to support pluralism. The ontology can be find with the file name "polyphony.owl" in this repository. In the followings, some of the main concepts that are used in Polyphony are briefly introduced.

Epistemic Disagreements

Epistemic disagreements can be beneficial. For example, epistemic peer disagree- ment in scientific practice has been argued to be valuable if scientists do not straight away defer to their peers’ conclusions, but nevertheless remain open to the peers’ evidence and arguments. Maintaining such disagreements motivates scientists to carefully check their hypotheses, improve their methodologies and provide better convincing evidence and arguments [4]. Study of epistemic disagreements is a fresh and active field of research [6,8, p.16]. Besides the very fundamental questions regarding existence and importance of disagreements, many epistemologists have tried to answer two main questions: (1) What types of disagreement exist? (2) What is the rational response to each type? Although no agreement among epistemologists exists regarding these questions, the first step towards development of an ontology for representing epistemic disagreements is to find at least partial answers to the questions. We summarize our attempt of doing so as follows:

Types of disagreements:

Some of the epistemologists have proposed a general binary distinction between peer disagreements and deep disagreements [11]. A disagreement is considered to be a peer disagreement, if two (or more) parties find themselves in a dispute with each other, while accepting that the other party is an epistemic peer (has a similar cognitive abilities, evidence, etc). A disagreement is a deep disagreement if it “cannot be solved through the use of argument, for they undercut the conditions essential to arguing” [5]. Another roughly binary distinction can be made between genuine disagree- ments and merely apparent disagreements [3]. If one or two parties be explicitly find themselves in a dispute, it can be referred as a genuine disagreement. Other- wise, if the disagreement is implicit and the two parties are not aware of it or do not care about it, the disagreement can be considered as a merely apparent disagreement.

However, it is not always simple to make a clear distinction between genuine disagreements and merely apparent disagreements. In particular, in case of merely verbal disagreements, that are totally terminological, it is very hard to categorize them as exclusively genuine or exclusively merely apparent disagreements. A classical example of such terminological disagreements is the dispute that can be caused by sentences like: “I am going to the bank” (due to two potential interpretations of the word bank) [3,10]. Another important type of disagreement proposed in the literature is faultless disagreement. This type of disagreement occurs in the fields similar to aesthetics, or matters of taste, where no party need to be mistaken [3]. For example, two persons can give different answers if they are asked whether Vienna is the most beautiful city of the world.

Potential responses to disagreements:

Although it is normally discussed in epistemology what is (are) the rational response(s) to different types of epistemic disagreement, here, to acknowledge pluralism in epistemological discussions, without entering the discussion of the most rational response, which is out of the scope of the Semantic Web, we consider the potential responses: (a) Rejecting the existence of the disagreement (b) Maintaining one’s confidence (c) Suspending judgment (d) Reducing one’s confidence (e) Deferring to the other’s conclusion.

References

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