Property Ontology & Code Smells

← Back to Domain-Specific Families

Abstractions that loosely connect how properties attach to bearers across philosophy, data design and inference — ontological accounts (quality inherence, immaterial spatial entities), data and schema models (attribute–value systems, relational model), code smells (data class, primitive obsession, refused bequest), and scope fallacies (accident, quantifier shift).

18 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Abnormal Quality — Record an observed property not as a bare measurement but as a four-role assertion — bearer, quality, reference state, and deviation judgment — so that departures from expectation become directly queryable across heterogeneous traits.
• Attribute–Value System — An attribute–value system describes each object through a shared set of typed attributes, assigning a value to every object–attribute pair in its complete form.
• Data Class — Flag an object-oriented class that holds fields with getters and setters but no domain methods as a symptom that its behavior migrated outward into consumers, then resolve the verdict with one role question — should this class enforce its own invariants?
• Data Model — A formal information-system structure that declares data types, attributes, relationships, integrity rules, and permitted operations at a stated conceptual, logical, or physical level.
• Defeasible Logic — Defeasible Logic derives definite and provisional conclusions from typed rules, blocking defeaters and explicit priorities when evidence conflicts.
• Elementary Key Normal Form — Elementary key normal form tests each minimal functional dependency against a key determinant or a target attribute in an elementary key.
• Elementary-embedding large-cardinal schema — A set-theoretic schema that classifies certain large-cardinal properties by an elementary embedding from V to a transitive class, its critical point, and an explicitly quantified target-model condition.
• Fallacy of Accident — The inferential mistake of applying a general rule mechanically to a case that satisfies its terms but lies outside its intended scope — treating a defeasible generalisation, carrying an implicit ceteris paribus clause, as an exceptionless universal.
• Fallacy of Division — Catch the inferential error of attributing a property true of a whole to each of its parts, by testing whether the predicate is one a part can hold in isolation or one that exists only in the aggregation, configuration, or interaction of parts.
• Immaterial Spatial Entity — A spatial particular — a hole, room, or border — that has a location, shape, and history yet is constituted of no matter, individuated instead by its relation to material bearers, and admitted (or not) as a first-class entity by whether eliminating it into bearer-talk loses a fact.
• Knowledge Space — Represent a curriculum as a family of feasible learner knowledge states rather than a single score, using union closure and related learning-path structure to separate what a learner can do from what the learner may be ready to learn next.
• One-to-one (data model) — A relationship cardinality in which each instance of either entity type is associated with at most one instance of the other, with optionality specified separately.
• Plato's Beard — Quine's name for the riddle that meaningful denial of an entity seems to require that entity to exist in some sense, entangling language about nonbeing with ontological commitment.
• Primitive Obsession — The code smell of representing domain concepts that carry structural commitments — units, valid ranges, well-formedness, identity — as bare primitives like int or string, so the type system cannot enforce the distinctions and they survive only as validation duplicated at every callsite.
• Quality inherence — Refuse to let a property exist on its own — bind every attribute to a bearer, a context, and the inherence relation that ties them, so a value with no namable owner is a category error, not a discovery.
• Quantifier Shift — An invalid inference from a possibly different witness for each case to one fixed witness for every case, without a premise licensing the stronger quantifier scope.
• Refused Bequest — Flag an inheritance edge as broken when a subclass accepts a parent's implementation but refuses part of its contract — stubbing, throwing, or silently mishandling inherited members — because that refusal is exactly the Liskov substitutability violation the is-a declaration promised not to make.
• Relational Model — Organize data as typed sets of tuples queried by a small closed algebra of relation-to-relation operators, so any composition is itself a valid query, rewrites preserve meaning, and the logical schema is separated from physical storage.