8. Foundations: system, part, and the ontological square
PKC's foundation is a combination of two sources. Dybkær's ontology on property (Dybkær, 2004)René Dybkær, 2004. An Ontology on Property for Physical, Chemical, and Biological Systems. PhD Thesis, University of Copenhagen supplies the metrological content — system, component, property, kind-of-property, scale, examination — and the discipline that every construct be a terminological commitment a model states rather than a convention a reader infers. Lowe's four-category ontology (Lowe, 2005)E. J. Lowe (December 2005). “The Four-Category Ontology: A Metaphysical Foundation for Natural Science”. Oxford University Press. . supplies the categorial frame: which of those constructs is a universal and which a particular, and along which relations they meet. The combination is load-bearing, and this chapter says where: Dybkær's text runs part–whole structure at two levels, in two vocabularies, without ever relating them, and the square is what relates them. A kind is ultimately a kind of some system — in the universal or the particular sense — and which sense a construct consumes decides what may be summed, what may be counted, and what a whole even is. Those decisions are made here, before the first aggregate, rather than discovered mid-proof.