Presuppositions of Frame Theory in the History of Philosophy

• Applicants: Privatdozent Dr. David Hommen; Professor Dr. Christoph Kann
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy ; History of Philosophy
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 452319975

The project intends a systematic and historical reconstruction and evaluation of frame theory as a universal format of knowledge representation. Originally developed for artificial intelligence data structures, increasing numbers of theorists in the fields of psychology, linguistics and philosophy hypothesize that representations at the neurocognitive level, the level of natural language as well as the level of institutionalized scientific classifications are organized into recursive attribute-value structures, so-called frames. The project in particular investigates the relation between type signatures and ontologies in the context of a frame-based approach to conceptual representation. Constituted by a type hierarchy, a set of attributes, and an appropriateness specification, a type signature constrains the implementation of attributes and values in a frame and so defines the space of possible frames. Philosophical questions with regard to type signatures concern the relation between the inferential structure of cognitive and linguistic representations on the one hand and the metaphysical structure of the natural world on the other. A type signature may be considered as a) an adequate model of our conceptual scheme, b) a normative framework for defining concepts, and c) an ontological taxonomy of extra-linguistic and extra-conceptual reality. The project examines the historical and systematic interconnections between these epistemological, methodological and metaphysical perspectives, linking the discussion of classical theories of categorization, in particular of the Aristotelian categorial scheme, to the definition of feature logics and to related approaches in formal ontology. The inquiry is not merely doxographic but should rather supply a deeper understanding of the structures, intentions and prerequisits of frame theory.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants