It Is What It Tends to Do: Defining Qualitative Parameter Regions by Their Effects on Physical Behavior

Qualitative descriptions of object arrangements and behaviors (e.g. terms such as “near” or “fast”) can be interpreted as placing constraints on the values of the parameters they refer to, but they do so in a context-dependent way. As such, it is problematic to define such qualitative terms by value regions. Instead, in this paper we propose “functional” definitions: a qualitative term’s meaning is defined by the effect on behavior of having that quality. The resulting functional definitions are context-dependent. To obtain a more general semantics for a qualitative term, we use concept blending to combine its functional definitions coming from several contexts. We then describe how a general, functional definition can be specialized to a new context, how this can be useful in transferring existing knowledge, and illustrate this with an example, raising the possibility that appropriate specializations may be supported with image schemas.