The Ontological Treatment of Sight and Blindness

There have been relatively few attempts to represent sight or blindness ontologically. This is unsurprising as the related phenomena of sight and blindness are surprisingly difficult to represent ontologically for a variety of reasons. This paper discusses those reasons, explores the current attempts to represent sight or blindness, and how these attempts fail at representing certain types of blindness, viz., color blindness and flash blindness. We then explore a possible solution to representing sight and blindness ontologically. The solution capitalizes on the resources afforded to one who adopts the upper-level Basic Formal Ontology. Roughly, we characterize sight as a function and blindness as a reduction in the conditions under which the sight function is realized. Keywords—ontology; sight; blindness; function; disposition; color blindness; flash blindness; Basic Formal Ontology.