Deep Lexical Semantics: The Ontological Ascent

Concepts of greater and greater complexity can be constructed by building systems of entities, by relating other entities to that system with a figure-ground relation, by embedding concepts of figure-ground in the concept of change, by embedding that in causality, and by coarsening the granularity and beginning the process over again. This process can be called the Ontological Ascent. It pervades natural language discourse, and suggests that to do lexical semantics properly, we must carefully axiomatize abstract theories of systems of entities, the figure-ground relation, change, causality, and granularity. In this paper, I outline what these theories should look like.