Yes, absolutely. Thinking about design in terms of defining an ontology is a great insight. Every object has a name and is therefore a part of some sort of semantics. However, what it does (it's meaning) is up to the designer. Therefore, words are naturally overloaded - they represent what we they do in reality, and their analog in our system.

As an example, let's assume we're developing a game where cats battle all sorts of other animals for survival. Certainly, the designer has good reason to call the object representing the protagonists in the game Cat. The programmer also has good reasons to call the enemies of the cat Animals, since they will all do the same thing (e.g. attack the cat). However, in this case a Cat is definitely not an Animal. Cat is an overloaded word - it no longer means "feline". Similarly, Animal means something completely different - it's more akin to "enemy". If we could substitute the "natural" ontology of these words with the one our objects define, we would be able to tell that the statement "A Cat is an Animal" is senseless.

I think OOP actually tries to take advantage of the "natural" ontologies we have constructed through experience. This is why this is such a subtle design issue. I'm not quite ready to say it "gets it backwards", but it certainly doesn't mirror the way we naturally look at the world.

I hope I'm mirroring and expanding on what's been said here. I'd love to read your thoughts.

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