Yamashita, Hiroki: A Framework for the Conditions of Comparability in Ontological Descriptions

Traditional ontology asks “what exists”; however, this formulation presupposes theory-specific criteria of existence and thereby makes structural comparison across theories generally difficult. This paper reformulates the problem at the level of “which ontological descriptions are well-defined” and proposes a minimal framework that enables the comparability of such descriptions. The framework represents an ontological description as a five-tuple M = (X, H, Φ, V, U), where X is a set of states, H