FOREWORD

Axiomathes was born as a philosophical journal closely concerned withCentral European philosophy and particularly with the thought and legacyof Franz Brentano.

Perhaps the most striking change in the new series of Axiomathes is itstransformation from a journal exclusively or mainly devoted to philosophyinto one with an interest in philosophy.

It is increasingly believed that contemporary philosophy has becometrapped in blind alleys. A number of reasonable explanations for this canbe put forward. We may for instance note that the two of the very mostinfluential philosophers of the last fifty years – Wittgenstein and Heidegger– rejected the alliance between science and philosophy. Another reason isthe fact that only very few philosophers seem to be aware of the deeplydynamic nature of contemporary science.

If we peruse the history of philosophy, we find that many importantphilosophers were also outstanding scientists, in the broad sense of theword. Suffice it to mention Aristotle, Descartes and Leibniz. Other greatphilosophers may not have been equally important as scientists but there isno doubt that they were profoundly versed in the science of their times. Thenames of Kant, Peirce. Brentano, Husserl and Whitehead spring to mind.The twentieth century has seen enormous technological advances and thearticulation of radically innovative scientific theories. But in the face of thisprogress, the mainstream philosophy of the last fifty years – both analyticand hermeneutic – has seemingly closed in upon itself concentrating onproblems that have little or nothing to do with the conceptual challengesraised by the sciences.

Axiomathes will do its best to narrow the gap between science (in itsmany facets) and philosophy. This is the rationale behind the shift from apurely philosophical journal to a journal with an interest in philosophy. Italso explains why, when planning the new editorial board, I did not appointa single pure philosopher. On the contrary I appointed a number of creativescientists (who are, to be sure, also well versed in philosophy or at leasthave an interest in philosophical issues).

Axiomathes 12: 1–5, 2001.© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Axiomathes will be a truly multi-disciplinary journal. It will publishpapers in a number of fields: psychology and the cognitive sciences, lin-guistics, artificial intelligence and logic are obvious candidates. It willpublish papers in philosophy as well, but with the clear understanding thatphilosophy is a science among other sciences.

If I were asked to single out the problem of the greatest conceptualconsequence, I would say that it is updating the idea of ontology.

Unfortunately, ‘ontology’ was a bad word for a vast majority of twen-tieth century philosophers, which is another of the above-mentioned blindalleys.

All the sciences have a basic ontological orientation. They seek to un-derstand the world and our experience of it. Ontology, as an autonomousdiscipline, studies the links among results arrived at by the various sci-ences. The trouble is that the pictures provided by the different sciences arecategorically different, and no conceptual framework capable of a propersynthesis is available. This means that an adequate ontological frameworkhas still to be elaborated.

Ontology needs the achievements of all the sciences if it is to accom-plish its aims. Even if we accept the Philosopher’s claim that, by virtue ofthe problems it addresses, ontology is philosophia prima (first philosophy),then because of the answers it proposes ontology can be only philosophiaultima (last philosophy). In between there lies science.

The notoriously bad reputation that ontology acquired in the twentieth-century is rapidly fading. In fact, contemporary interest in ontology isincreasing, in both philosophy and the other sciences. Suffice it to mentionthe growing field of ontology in artificial intelligence (especially in nat-ural language processing and data-base theory). Ontology comes into playwhenever an artificial system must communicate information to anothersystem and the two systems are set up in different ways with different data-names, structures and purposes. In this situation, ontology is an instrumentto give greater robustness to data-bases. Knowledge about how the thingsof the world are constituted may render their codification simpler, moretransparent and more natural. Consequently, contemporary ontology is notmerely categorical analysis; it is also a technology.

A traditional problem is the connections between ontology and epi-stemology. The difference between ontology and epistemology can beevidenced by listing their concepts. Ontological concepts are those ofobject, process. particular, individual, whole, part, property and quality.Epistemological concepts are those of belief, knowledge and uncertain orwrong knowledge.

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If ontology is the theory of the structures of objects, epistemology isthe theory of the different kinds of knowledge and the ways in which it isused.

One position gaining increasing acceptance is that there is a mutual de-pendence between ontology and epistemology. If this is the case, we shouldspecify both what ontology can say about epistemology (a belief is a kindof (mental) object, it has parts and properties, etc.), and what epistemologycan say about ontology (knowledge of the structure of objects is a kind ofknowledge). The task is a difficult one, and mistakes are always possible,but there seems to be no principled reason for denying its feasibility.

Indeed, my own position is even more radical, for it holds that thecore of epistemology, if properly understood, is ontology. Epistemologydeals with cognitive activities developed by agents able to represent theirenvironment. The only point to be borne in mind is that particulars withinternal representations start from an intrinsically deictic ontology.

In many respects, deictic ontology seems to be the most natural formof ontology. It starts from the premise that all categorizations stem fromthe ability of a cognitive subject to recognize and classify. Deictic onto-logy, in other words, is based on the distinction between two components(the referential component and the characterizing component), which arereciprocally saturated in the performance of an act of categorization.

A deictic ontology comprises a base: an indexical subject which activ-ates the specific instances of the referential and characterizing componentsused in its acts. It is evident, therefore, that deictic ontology is the naturalontology of a cognitive subject. In other words, it is the natural ontologydeveloped by certain particular types of dynamic systems, and thereforethe ontology developed by particulars that starts from a specific layer ofreality: the mental (psychic) one.

The elaboration of a thoroughly general ontology, one perhaps able togenerate deictic ontology as its specific instance, requires adequate neut-ralization of the indexical subject (and of the correlated referential act).This neutralization must at the same time make explicit and neutralize thebase (the origin): the deictic singularity proper to deictic ontology.

Many scientists, and many philosophers as well, still believe that phys-ics is the queen of the sciences. I share such an enthusiasm if it meansthat physics is perhaps the more developed, refined and successful of thesciences. But I strongly deny its legitimacy if it is intended to mean thatthe only true reality is the one described by physics. Otherwise stated, Icannot give any sense to any reductionist programme.

As a matter of fact, physics itself destroys reductionism. Let us agree inaccepting that the universe began with the Big Bang. The deep meaning of

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this thesis is that all the varieties, diversities and structures of the universeare derived. Not only are flowers and universities derived objects, but sotoo are molecules, and atoms and any particle thereof. All reality (better,all realities) spring from that initial singularity. At this point there are twopossibilities: either the whole of reality is somehow, at least implicitly,stored in such a singularity, or reality continuously grows and builds newstructures. Besides complexity issues, I simply cannot imagine any way inwhich the information concerning the whole of reality can be compressedwithin a single singularity. The only remaining option is to accept the ideathat reality is creative, and that new realities constantly arise. If so, whyshould we confine our sense of reality to only a few of its structures? Thefirst structures to have emerged may be basic, in the sense that later struc-tures require former structures, and are built upon them or developed fromthem. Which means that an order of emergence is embedded in the world,and that it unfolds by stages. A theory of the levels of reality is there-fore required to clarify many of the still unknown connections betweenthe various levels of emergence. It may also be reasonable to ask whetherthe deepest and most valuable layers of reality are the older or the newerones. Should we not seriously reconsider the otherwise discredited idea ofteleology?

The lack of a comprehensive categorial systems is one of the reasonswhy it is so difficult to coordinate, and explain with adequately robusttheories, the indisputable experimental and technological successes of thecontemporary sciences.

These considerations converge on the idea of a dynamic ontology. Aris-totle and Leibniz are two of the great philosophers of the past who soughtto develop a categorial system of dynamic nature. Closer to our times arethe endeavours of Brentano. Husserl and Hartmann in Europe and of Peirceand Whitehead in the United States. The project pursued by Axiomathesconcerns such profound and fundamental problems that it needs the helpof the best. By standing on their shoulders perhaps we will be able to seea little bit further.

All these themes fall within the interests of Axiomathes. The foregoingconsiderations are summed up in the following text, which will be printedon the title page as a synopsis of the journal’s aims and approach.

Axiomathes is a peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to the study of ontology andcognitive systems. It is open in contributions from a variety of scientific communities(psychology and cognitive science, artificial intelligence and knowledge representation,linguistics and lexicography, mathematics and logic. biology, philosophy). Axiomathes willdistinguish itself from other journals by its thesis that real advances in the above fieldsmay depend upon a consideration of the origins and intellectual history of certain keyideas at the forefront of current research. Contributions are invited especially on such turn-

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of-the century Central-European thinkers as Brentano, Husserl or Hartmann and on theircontemporaries in the English-speaking world like Peirce and Whitehead. In other words,Axiomathes will have a foreground interest in contemporary issues in cognition and onto-logy, and a background interest in intellectual history. The journal’s foreground interestsare summed up in the subtitle ‘An International Journal in Ontology and Cognitive Sys-tems’. Some of the focal topics of interest are the following: intentionality and intentionalreference, time and space, the difference between the perceptive and the mental, levels ofreality, forms of dependence, ontological versus cognitive categories, types of particulars,wholes and their parts, dynamical and evolutionary systems, classification theory, naturaland non-natural kinds, cognitive semantics, assumptions and counterfactuals, mathematicaland logical modeling.

Roberto Poli