[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
* In the view of BFO-friendly ontologies, there exists no thing that IS evidence. Instead, evidence is a ROLE that can be plaid by things in a certain context.
Mathias, if you look carefully at BFO, you'll see that roles are entities. This means that evidences, as roles, are entities.
If an x is a piece of evidence, it plays, as you say, the role of evidence; this means, in BFO's view, that there is an instance of evidence role that inheres in x. In other words, if x plays the role of evidence, this implies the existence of two entities -- x and its evidence role.
If you do not like this view, do not complain to me; I merely make you aware of this.
You could reject this view and say that there are no role-instances; but then BFO would imply a number of non-instantiable universals, while one of the principles underlying BFO is the Aristotelian view that universals exist exclusively within their instances -- such universals would not exist at all, there would be no roles, nothing to be played. Alternatively, you could say that there is no separate role-instance entity, and it is x that instantiates the evidence-universal, but this would clearly contradict your original statement.
cc: to Barry, for corrections if needed. vQ
