2024/04/30 by John Beverley, David Limbaugh, Beverley, John +6
Computer Science · Neuroscience · Social Sciences · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Chaos, Complexity, and Education #Embodied and Extended Cognition #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Innovation, Sustainability, Human-Machine Systems #Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.00183
openalex publication_date 2024/04/30 · openalex created_date 2024/05/03 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In our daily lives, as in science and in all other domains, we encounter huge numbers of dispositions (tendencies, potentials, powers) which are realized in processes such as sneezing, sweating, shedding dandruff, and on and on. Among this plethora of what we can think of as mere dispositions is a subset of dispositions in whose realizations we have an interest a car responding well when driven on ice, a rabbits lungs responding well when it is chased by a wolf, and so on. We call the latter capabilities and we attempt to provide a robust ontological account of what capabilities are that is of sufficient generality to serve a variety of purposes, for example by providing a useful extension to ontology-based research in areas where capabilities data are currently being collected in siloed fashion.