Innovation and Ontologies

136 Concept Formation
1.1.2 Analytic and Scientific Philosophy
When Aristotle created his classification of being, he ignored the limitations of transporting
meaning via language as well as the ambiguity which might result from different meanings
(Maedche, 2003). Ambiguity or homonymy means that one and the same word has different
meanings to different speakers (cf. table 43):
Jaguar Cars Limited is a luxury
car manufacturer 155 .
The jaguar 156 (Panthera onca)
is a New World mammal of
the Felidae family.
The SEPECAT Jaguar 157 is an
Anglo-French ground attack
aircraft.
table 43 Three possible notions of ‘jaguar’ (based on Gandon, 2002a)
It also happens that different terms for one concept exist, a phenomenon called synonymy
(Gandon, 2002a). This is the case with car, automobile, motorcar, vehicle etc.
Phenomena of ambiguity and synonymy were studied among others by Frege, one of the
founders of analytic philosophy (Frege, 1892a & 1892b). He was interested in the distinction
between concept and object (Frege, 1892a) as well as between sense and reference (Frege,
1892b). Based on Frege’s works, Cambridge linguist Ogden, together with Richards, published in
1923 the so-called meaning triangle illustrated below (Ogden & Richards, 1923):
figure 43 The meaning triangle (based on Ogden & Richards, 1923)
155 The image of the Jaguar XK8 is available online at: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Jaguar.xk8.car.750pix.jpg (2007/10/07).
156 The image of the jaguar is available online at: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Jaguar_head_shot.jpg (2007/10/07).
157 The image of the SEPECAT Jaguar is available online at: https://airdefense.bliss.army.mil/ (2007/10/07).