PL-Onto and common sense

Part of my concept of developing Lexical Semantics of Construal LSCon is to develop a Populated Local Ontology PL-Onto

• The detailed empirical results of PL-Onto in LSCon-EN should be of interest to researchers in AI because it gives a concrete window in several domains of common sense, providing a more precise characterization of what it is.
• We assume that the vague notion of common sense is constructed with the help of general concepts about situations and how individuals and situations interact, the PL-Onto level of Situation. This level constitutes (at least in part) the upper ontology of PL-Onto.
• The "upper" level of Situation abstracts from the concrete details of other levels. It embodies the common sense intuitions of how situations work across other levels
  
• The empirical work of deriving PL-Onto from MRD data can be done gradually, by layered level. The more basic levels make less complex assumptions about the world. Presumably they use only part of the upper ontology, the more basic the level, the smaller or simpler the part.
• The PL-Onto level of Physical builds on intuitions that the world is nothing but res extensa, physical bodies made of matter and occupying space and time. These bodies have physical qualities that change, and interact because of forces. The source of force is not analyzed in detail, though it may be the movement of some animate creature, an Agent. Clauses describing a Physical situation may not mention an underlying animate cause of interaction, and the SUBJ in the clause may be some inanimate participant which we can call an Actant (or Sowa's Initiator), a thematic role with fewer assumptions than Agent.
• The PL-Onto level of Animate builds on intuitions that Actions in the world are caused by the movement of animate creatures, various species of animals or humans seen primarily as moving creatures with bodies (ignoring specifically human capacities, social dimensions, or mental life).
• [does "function" begin here, teleological functions relating to assumed biological regularities that are long-range and homeostatically maintained by biological systems?]
  
• The PL-Onto level of Human allows the expression of basic common sense intuitions about how humans interact with each other and the world.
• The PL-Onto level of Institution allows the expression of common sense intuitions about social institutions, and how humans interact socially.
• [Should Artifact be split off, to characterize objects that are intentionally constructed with a "functional" purpose? Need to investigate nouns first. Perhaps verbs like "operate, build, construct" should be moved to level Artifact]
• [examples, what they tell us about common sense]
• The PL-Onto level of Attitude allows the expression of common sense intuitions about Intentionality [Searle]
• This level embodies "folk psychology," providing Reasons for Action from the unseen domain of internal mental causes for human action. [see Dretske]
  
• The scheme of individuation at this level has an intrinsic 1&3P character, so intuitions about the phenomenality of mental states can be accounted for at this level.
• Although mental states in others are unseen, they are readily inferrable from behavior (and language reports) as causes for human Action. Causality at this level is likely very different from physical causes when the world is seen as simply Physical.
  
• The intuitions about these differences underly Descartes distinction between res extensa and res cogitans. Thinking things, the mental state of thinking creatures, appear not to have physical extent since they are unseen. Descartes, working under the influence of a neo-Platonist tradition about ousia (Substantive-entities), considered primarily the Type-level of mental entities, taken to be immutable Forms. As a more modern alternative conception, we can consider Type-level of mental entities to be location-parameter-absorbed situation-types where humans are in a mental state. With a nod to Perry's antecedent physicalism, there can be a purely physicalist account of the Token-situations that ground these situation-types, working within a physicalist 3P scheme of individuation. However, situation-types that are intrinsically mental are individuated through a 1&3P scheme that associates phenomenality with mental entities, providing some kind of insight into the "hard problem" of consciousness
• Common sense intuitions about mental states, the stuff of folk psychology, give humans readily inferrable information about unseen causal states underlying the Actions of others. PL-Onto at this level gives a detailed characterization of (linguistic aspects of) common sense about Intentionality in human Action. It allows a characterization of what is cognitively accessible to humans as they behave motivated by mental reasons for action. This provides a window into the "easier" problem of cognitive access (what Nagel earlier called access consciousness).
• This characterization does not depend on functionalism or teleology, it can derive functions and purpose from more basic entities of mental states, as expressed in the content of utterances expressing common sense intuitions about Intentionality in human Action. Functionalist and teleological explanations are not necessarily wrong, but they may be a bit backward in explaining cognitive processes from the outside in. It is admittedly difficult to come up with alternative explanations starting from "inside" the head with unseen mental states. But this task becomes easier if we make use of the window into mental states provided by the empirically-derived PL-Onto level of Attitude (and Language).
  
• Mental state may not be epistemologically-objective because they cannot be directly seen (humans only physically "see" behavior, not mental causes). However, mental states can be readily inferred from behavior, and reliably confirmed by subsequent behavior and language. Humans can indirectly "see" mental causes of behavior through the lens of folk psychology.
• Once we accept as valid both direct observations (epistemologically-objective) and indirect observations as valid empirical basis of science, we can develop a rigorous cognitive psychology account of the phenomena characterized by common sense or "folk" psychology. The indirect observations are not arbitrarily subjective, they are intersubjective is consistent and observationally-confirmable ways.
  
• The subject matter of this characterization of mental states as entities for scientific study has been rejected out of hand the Behaviorism and related tradtions in experimental psychology. Mental states are taken to be ontologically-subjective, as well as epistemologically-subjective. This is a methodological error in psychological research, grounded in unhelpful philosophical assumptions about the lived world of psychological phenomena. The alternative is to treat mental states as ontologically-objective real entities seen through the lens of human schemes of individuation, specifically the 1&3P scheme of individuation mental states. In fact, modern technology discovered after the demise of Behaviorism allows researchers to physically "see" traces of mental states using fMRI, PET, advanced EEG, etc.
  
• It will be difficult to characterize mental entities if only approached "bottom-up" from the physical tokens of mental phenomena. If we use the indirect inter-subjective evidence of verbal reports about mental entities, a "top-down" approach, we can come out with precise theoretical accounts that can be confirmed or refuted by physical evidence. Extracting the PL-Onto levels of Attitude and Language depends on available print resources that characterize lexical knowledge (of the English speech community) and a window into common sense about Intentional mental states.
  
• This can be helpful to the scientific study of cognition, and also to weak AI technologists who need to characterize common sense precisely enough for some practical purpose.
• Therefore, we can move beyond Cartesian dualism and start treating mental entities as ontologically-objective real entities within the purview of cognitive science, observed using direct physical and indirect inter-subjective methods. The inter-subjective methods are reliable and confirmable. Extracting PL-Onto from lexical resources is a way of moving forward with this method to characterize (the linguistically accessible part of) common sense about human mental states.
• So the level of Attitude characterizes the vocabulary used in talking about the lived world of mental life, where Actions are caused by mental states inferred but not seen in other humans.
• Although mental states in others are unseen, they are inferred tokens of "the same" types that a human uses to classify their own mental states. This helps account for the intuition that there is something "it is like" [Nagel] to be a human experiencing a mental state. Through the shared 1&3P scheme of individuation of types of mental states (a subset of which are the verbal concepts for mental states expressed in verbs of propositional attitude), humans can infer states that have properties of cognitive access and phenomenality [what Nagel earlier called access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness].
  
• The PL-Onto level of Language allows the expression of common sense intuitions about utterances using the human language capacity.