Logic and Ontology

Abstract

A brief review of the historical relation between logic and ontology and of the opposition between the views of logic as language and logic as calculus is given. We argue that predication is more fundamental than membership and that different theories of predication are based on different theories of universals, the three most important being nominalism, conceptualism, and realism.These theories can be formulated as formal ontologies, each with its own logic, and compared with one another in terms of their respective explanatory powers. After a brief survey of such a comparison, we argue that an extended form of conceptual realism provides the most coherent formal ontology and, as such, can be used to defend the view of logic as language.