Relational roles and qua-individuals

Abstract

2Institut de recherche en informatique de Toulouse – IRIT-CNRS, Toulouse, France In this paper we present and compare two different ap-proaches to the notion of “relational role ” and connected is-sues. Both approaches are based on the introduction of the notion of “qua-individual ” and on the reification of relations. We use a classical problem in the literature on roles, namely the counting problem, as testbed, and we show how the two approaches deal with it in a similar way. We nevertheless show that they are to be distinguished, examining several as-pects emerging from their relation with the notion of trope.