Ontology Summit 2026 Foundations and Tools

Nicola Guarino Ontological Analysis as a Search for Truthmakers
- A crucial choice when designing an ontology concerns, of course, what to include in the domain of discourse. The entities that are relevant for our conceptualization of reality—those we implicitly assume to exist—are typically far more numerous than those we explicitly choose to talk about. So, our cognitive domain is much broader than our domain of discourse. For example, when we say that John and Mary are married, our language only refers to them, although we know that there has been a wedding event and that an ongoing marriage relationship exists. It is up to us to introduce these additional entities in our domain of discourse, should we need to represent and reason about them. In this talk I will argue that formal ontology gives us a clear criterion for this decision: include in the domain the truthmakers of the relevant propositions we aim to represent. In this talk I will introduce different kinds of truthmakers, depending on the types of properties and relationships involved, and I will show how various truthmaking patterns can enhance the explanatory value of an ontology.

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