History in the Basic Formal Ontology

The Basic Formal Ontology’s (BFO) current approach to ‘history’, in contradistinction to how the referent of ‘history’ has been described in scholarly work upon which the BFO is built, is quite reductionist: it allows only material entities to have a history, and what contributes to their histories is restricted to what takes place in the spatiotemporal region ‘occupied by’ the material parts. This has as one consequence that certain processes in which a material entity participates are not part of its history. In addition, the BFO is silent about whether instances of other types of continuants have a ‘history’. We explore how this situation came to be and propose two alternative versions for ‘history’ inclusive to all sorts of continuants currently recognized by the BFO.