Towards a new world-ontology

A crucial problem of knowledge representation is that it has to be for-mal and informal at the same time. Here, ‘formal ’ refers to knowledge as a mathematical concept which is thought, and ‘informal ’ to knowledge as something which is experienced, i.e. a ‘real ’ world phenomenon. This paper is an attempt to reconcile these potentially contradictory conditions. Our aim is to show that a cognitively based formal representation may exist, underlying traditional (formal) ontology, which may uniformly characterize the different domains of human knowledge like logic, language, mathematics, etc. We derive such a representation from the properties of cognition and signification, and elaborate its application in propositional logic and (briefly) in syntax.