Semantics Matters - A New Light on Ontological Commitments of Logics.

It is a central foundational theme to specify ontological commitments that are implicitly embedded in formal logic. In this paper, we address a largely unexplored topic of ontological commitments of the semantics of logic. In particular, we focus on the idea of “modal logic without possible worlds” in contradistinction with the widespread usage of the possible-world semantics in formal ontology. More concretely, we present B. Vetter’s potentiality-based theory of possibility and discuss how to develop a modal semantics that would accord with the modal primacy of dispositions in the upper ontology Basic Formal Ontology (BFO).