An ontology of natural cognition: The substance and structure of everyday thought

Abstract

This work continues an ongoing investigation into the nature of everyday thought processes or natural cognition. It offers a descriptive, ontological account of the content and structure of natural cognition. The ontology is presented informally first, using natural language, then a formalized, symbolic representation is given. The informal version serves the theoretical purpose of exhaustively describing natural cognition and the practical purpose of providing the material from which to construct the formal version. The formal version serves the same theoretical purpose, but it is also considered whether it may be of practical importance to work being done, for example, in knowledge engineering, database design, human-computer interface technology, semantic web development, or artificial intelligence research in general. The domain of this investigation is everyday human cognition. However, some account of the environments in which we live and the products of human creation is called for insofar as these things are inextricably related to cognition--cognition and environment heavily influence one another. The work is, in a broad sense, an ontological consideration of the way the world affects our thoughts and thought processes and the way we affect the world by way of our cognitive acts and abilities.