CLASSIFICATION AND AMBIGUITY: THE ROLE OF DEFINITION IN A CONCEPTUAL SYSTEM

With the advent of the semantic web, the problem of ambiguity is becoming more and more urgent. Semantic analysis is necessary for explaining and resolving some sorts of ambiguity by inquiring into the relation between possibilities of predication and definition of a concept in order to solve problems of interpretation of natural language discourse. Computing is now confronting such problems of linguistic analysis (Diggelen et al. 2004), and it is worth inquiring into the development of linguistic studies that can be useful for developing the theoretical background of ontologies. Our proposal is to develop a workable solution that passes between the horns of the dilemma posed by the traditional metaphysical approach versus the modern relativistic account. We interpret the ancient notion of essential definition in a pragmatic perspective, and show how the dialectical definition by genus and difference corresponds to the semantic analysis of the definiendum.