The intentional relationship of representation between the constructs of a language and reality

Abstract

Specifications of conceptualisations (ontologies) are often employed for represent- ing reality, both in knowledge representation and software engineering. While lan- guages o®er sophisticated constructs and rigorous semantics for building concep- tual entities, no attention is paid to the relationship between such entities and the world they intend to represent. This paper studies such a relationship and provides empirical evidences in favour of two main hypotheses: (1) conceptualisations are insuficient to fully represent the specifics of reality; (2) languages (both represen- tation and design-oriented) are general representations of (classes of) systems in the world, and they can be characterised as scientific theories. The first hypoth- esis establishes a problem for which we propose a solution based on the explicit elaboration of statements claiming the similarity (in some respects and to certain degrees of accuracy) between conceptual entities and real-world systems of interest. The second hypothesis constitutes a new perspective for understanding languages, whose advantages to representation and design are discussed in detail.