Categories
The common property of all categories is that they can be predicated of an entity.
Categories in GFO are further divided in immanent universals, conceptual structures and symbolic structures. Immanent universals are so-called Aristotlian universals, in the sense that they are considered in re. This means, that these universals exist in all the entities which instantiate an immanent universal, independent of an observer. An example of an immanent universal could be APPLE. The universal APPLE exists in all apples, independent of perception by an agent.
Conceptual structures are mental representations of entities or universals, and they exist in an agent's mind. For example, the individual representation of the (linguistic) term "apple" inside an agent's mind (determined by the agent's experience, knowledge and belief, etc.).
Symbolic structures are signs which may be instantiated by tokens. They have the property to stand for something beyond themselves. An example is the physical pattern "apple", which instantiates the "APPLE" symbolic structure.
Read more about this topic: General Formal Ontology
Famous quotes containing the word categories:
“All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“all the categories which we employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as ideas, purposes, resolutions, and so on, can be applied to ... these latent states.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“Of course I’m a black writer.... I’m not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren’t marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call “literature” is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hassidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.”
—Toni Morrison (b. 1931)