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Classifying Processes

Highlights

  • Processes, in particular, cannot change on the four-dimensionalist view, because processes are changes
  • Continuants may change not only through change in qualities but also in other ways. For example they may gain and lose parts over time, as for example when you gain and lose cells from your body. To address such changes, BFO’s instance-level continuant parthood relation is indexed by time. The counterpart relation on the side of occurrents, in contrast, holds always in a non-indexed way.

Processes as Dependent Entities

  • Processes themselves stand to the independent continuants which are their participants in a relation that is analogous to that in which qualities stand to the independent continuants which are their bearers. In both cases we have to deal with the relation of what BFO calls specific dependence.

  • Something which processes may share is a process profile -- each contains an instantiation of multiple process profile universals.

Conclusion

  • One important next step will deal with the ways in which such classification is complicated by the fact that processes are embedded within a series of larger process wholes, each nested within yet larger process wholes.
  • Human physiological processes, too, are embedded within series of larger wholes in this way. When studying the heart, for example, physiologists may investigate processes within the interior of the left ventricle, interactions between the left ventricle and other parts of the cardiovascular system, interactions between this system and other bodily systems, and so on. Physiologists may be interested in the processes involving multiple organisms; for example they may be interested in some given organism as part of one or other larger whole which includes some population of organisms of a relevant similar type (all humans, all human babies of a given birth weight, all athletes, and so on). Normal processes are defined for this larger population (as normal qualities were defined above), and deviations from this norm are defined for the single organism relative thereto.