本体的扩大和对抽象事物的指称

Expansion in Ontology and Reference to Abstract Entities

在外延语义学中,语言表达式在语义指派中会映射到模型中的事物上。这些事物构成了世界的本体。模型中的经典事物包括个体、集合和真值,它们是经典语义学早期的基本设定。这当然不是语义学的全部。自语义学诞生以来,学者们发现有的语言表达式的指称难以在现有本体论、模型论框架下得到确定,于是他们创造性地在模型中引入新的实体,这也是语义学发展的一条主线:不断引入新实体以更好地处理语言与世界的对应关系。本文的目的是介绍"数、整体、事件、类、阶段"这几种实体引入语义研究的历史概况和来龙去脉,了解引入新实体的理据,学习西方学者敢为人先的学术胆识和精巧严密的论证手段。

In extensional semantics, linguistic expressions are mapped to entities in the model, which constitute the ontology in philosophy. The classical entities in the model include individuals, sets, and truth values. This of course is not the whole landscape of modern semantics. Since the birth of semantics, scholars found that some of the linguistic expressions cannot be easily assigned to the existing entities in the model, so they innovatively introduced new entities into the model. This is a main avenue for the development of modern semantics： incessantly introducing new entities in order to better manage the mapping relation between language and the world. This paper is to give a historical overview for the introduction of several new entities （ numbers, sums, events, kinds, and stages） into the model. The purpose is to help us appreciate western scholars＇ academic innovativeness in introducing new ideas and pioneering into new areas and to help us benefit from the logic of their elaborate argumentation embodied in their ground-breaking works.