Merons, taxons, and qualities: A taxonomy of aspects

In the literature there are no standard meanings for words like aspect, attribute, characteristic, feature, property, and quality. Because the denoted concepts have not been well understood or differentiated, the terminology is highly unsettled, resulting in significant mis communication, imprecision, and confusion in scientific discourse. Ascriptive ontology is the name given here to the science of basic types of aspects, those ubiquitous facts by which we know, describe, and represent things of interest. Aspects underlie virtually every scientific construct, from theories, models, meronomies, taxonomies, concepts, and laws to simple empirical facts. Specifically in terminology, aspects underlie all types of definitions, concepts and concept systems. A new comprehensive taxonomy of aspects is proposed, and concise, uniform names are suggested for the respective concepts. Based on this taxonomy, a new semantic network notation called ETA is briefly introduced.