Love is deeply personal and philosophically complex; it is also surprisingly underdeveloped in ontology engineering. Given the amount of research on this topic, it is worth moving beyond vague definitions towards a rigorous ontological model.

My favored starting point is what I call the Concatenation View (CV), which defines love as the combination of a passive sensation (e.g., emotional arousal) and an active evaluative judgment (e.g., perceiving the beloved as valuable). This model reconcile love’s felt immediacy with its rational accountability—addressing the philosophical puzzle of why love seems both involuntary and yet subject to justification. Among other benefits, this view explains the irrationality of love, namely, that we tend to want better for those we love than what we believe they deserve.

There are, of course, objections worth handling, such as how love can be causally linked to judgments about a beloved rather than merely being a regular co-occurrence of feelings and thoughts. To find out more, you’ll simply have to wait for me to finish the current paper I’m writing.

Stay tuned.