Dogma in religion

Dogmata are found in many religions such as Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, where they are considered core principles that must be upheld by all followers of that religion. As a fundamental element of religion, the term "dogma" is assigned to those theological tenets which are considered to be well demonstrated, such that their proposed disputation or revision effectively means that a person no longer accepts the given religion as his or her own, or has entered into a period of personal doubt. Dogma is distinguished from theological opinion regarding those things considered less well-known. Dogmata may be clarified and elaborated but not contradicted in novel teachings (e.g., Galatians 1:8-9). Rejection of dogma is considered heresy in certain religions, and may lead to expulsion from the religious group.

For most of Eastern Christianity, the dogmata are contained in the Nicene Creed and the canons of two, three, or seven ecumenical councils (depending on whether one is Nestorian, Oriental Orthodox, or Eastern Orthodox). These tenets are summarized by St. John of Damascus in his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, which is the third book of his main work, titled The Fount of Knowledge. In this book he takes a dual approach in explaining each article of the Eastern Orthodox faith: one for Christians, where he uses quotes from the Bible and, occasionally, from works of other Fathers of the Church, and the second, directed both at non-Christians (but who, nevertheless, hold some sort of religious belief) and at atheists, where he attempts to employ Aristotelian logic and dialectics, especially reductio ad absurdum.

Catholics also hold as dogma the decisions of fourteen later councils and two decrees promulgated by popes exercising papal infallibility (see immaculate conception and Assumption of Mary). Protestants to differing degrees affirm portions of these dogmata, and often rely on denomination-specific 'Statements of Faith' which summarize their chosen dogmata (see, e.g., Eucharist).

In Islam, the dogmatic principles are contained in the aqidah. However, the dogmatic principles are built after examining God's signs, and truths. .

Within many Christian denominations, dogma is instead referred to as "doctrine".

See also

• Age of Enlightenment
• Conversational intolerance
• Dogmatic definition
• Freethought
• Skepticism

External links

• Dogma - Strong's N.T. Greek Lexicon

DOGMA (Developing Ontology-Grounded Methods and Applications) is the name of research project in progress at Vrije Universiteit Brussel's STARLab (Semantics Technology and Applications Research Laboratory). It is an internally funded project, concerned with the more general aspects of extracting, storing, representing and browsing information.

Technical Introduction

1. taxonomical relationship (genus): e.g., < G, manager, is a, subsumes, person >;
2. non-taxonomical relationship (differentia): ''e.g.', < G, manager, directs, directed by, company >.

Lexons could be approximately considered as a combination of an RDF/OWL triple and its inverse, or as a conceptual graph style relation (Sowa, 1984). Next, we will elaborate more on the notions of context.

Language versus Conceptual Level

For example, consider a term “capital”. If this term was elicited from a typewriter manual, it has a different meaning (read: concept definition) than when elicited from a book on marketing. The intuition that a context provides here is: a context is an abstract identifier that refers to implicit and tacit assumptions in a domain, and that maps a term to its intended meaning (i.e. concept identifier) within these assumptions (Jarrar et al., 2003).

Ontology Evolution

Ontologies naturally co-evolve with their communities of use. Therefore, in (De Leenheer et al., 2007) we identified a set of primitive operators for changing ontologies. We make sure these change primitives are conditional, which means that their applicability depends on pre- and post-conditions (Banerjee et al., 1987). Doing so, we guarantee that only valid structures can be built.

Context Dependency Types

In (De Leenheer and de Moor, 2005), we distinguished four key characteristics of context:

1. a context packages related knowledge: it defines part of the knowledge of a particular domain,
2. it disambiguates the lexical representation of concepts and relationships by distinguishing between language level and conceptual level,
3. it defines context dependencies between different ontological contexts and
4. contexts can be embedded or linked, in the sense that statements about contexts are themselves in context.

Based on this, we identified three different types of context dependencies within one ontology (intra-ontological) and between different ontologies (inter-ontological): articulation, application, and specialisation. One particular example in the sense of conceptual graph theory (Sowa, 1984) would be a specialisation dependency for which the dependency constraint is equivalent to the conditions for CG-specialisation (Sowa, 1984: pp. 97).

Context dependencies provide a better understanding of the whereabouts of knowledge elements and their inter-dependencies, and consequently make negotiation and application less vulnerable to ambiguity, hence more practical.

References

• Mustafa Jarrar: Towards methodological principles for ontology engineering. PhD Thesis. Vrije Universiteit Brussel. (May 2005)
• Mustafa Jarrar: Towards the notion of gloss, and the adoption of linguistic resources in formal ontology engineering. In proceedings of the 15th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2006). Edinburgh, Scotland. Pages 497-503. ACM Press. ISBN: 1595933239. May 2006.
• Mustafa Jarrar and Robert Meersman: Ontology Engineering -The DOGMA Approach. In Elizabeth Chang and Tharam Dillon and Robert Meersman and Katia Sycara (eds): Advances in Web Semantic. Volume 1, A state-of-the Art Semantic Web Advances in Web Semantics IFIP2.12. Chapter 3. Springer. 2007.
• Banerjee, J., Kim, W. Kim, H., and Korth., H. (1987) Semantics and implementation of schema evolution in object-oriented databases. Proc. ACM SIGMOD Conf. Management of Data, 16(3), pp. 311-322
• De Leenheer P, de Moor A (2005). Context-driven disambiguation in ontology elicitation. In P. Shvaiko and J. Euzenat (eds), Context and Ontologies: Theory, Practice, and Applications. Proc. of the 1st Context and Ontologies Workshop, AAAI/IAAI 2005, Pittsburgh, USA, pp 17–24
• De Leenheer P, de Moor A, Meersman R (2007). Context dependency management in ontology engineering: a formal approach. Journal on Data Semantics VIII, LNCS 4380, Springer, pp 26-56
• Jarrar, M., Demey, J., Meersman, R. (2003) On reusing conceptual data modeling for ontology engineering. Journal on Data Semantics 1(1):185–207
• Spyns P, Meersman R, Jarrar M (2002). Data modeling versus ontology engineering. SIGMOD Record, 31(4), pp 12–17