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456Towards a Science of Emerging MediaIn J. E. Katz & J. Floyd (eds.), Philosophy of Emerging Media: Understanding, Appreciation and Application, Oxford University Press. pp. 29-48. 2015.If media studies are to become established as a genuine science, then it needs to be determined what the subject matter of this science is to be. I propose a specification of this subject matter as consisting in: 1. the new sorts of digital entities that have been added to social reality through the invention of the digital computer, and 2. the new sorts of interactions involving human beings which such entities make possible. I support this proposal by examining examples of some of the ways in …Read more
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10Legal ontology and the problem of normativityThe Analytic-Continental Divide, Conference, University of Tel Aviv. 1999.Applied ontology is the attempt to put to use the rigorous tools of philosophical ontology in the development of category systems which can be of use in the formalization and systematization of knowledge of a given domain. In what follows we shall sketch some elements of the ontology of legal and socio-political institutions, paying attention especially to the normativity involved in such institutions. We shall see that there is more than one type of normativity, but that this fact that has ofte…Read more
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440The Theory of Value of Christian von EhrenfelsIn Reinhard Fabian (ed.), Christian von Ehrenfels: Leben und Werk, Rodopi. pp. 150-171. 1986.Christian von Ehrenfels was a student of both Franz Brentano and Carl Menger and his thinking on value theory was inspired both by Brentano’s descriptive psychology and by the subjective theory of economic value advanced by Menger, the founder of the Austrian school of economics. Value, for Ehrenfels, is a function of desire, and we ascribe value to those things which we either do in fact desire, or would desire if we were not convinced of their existence. He asserts that the needed theoretical …Read more
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298Horizontal Integration of Warfighter Intelligence Data: A Shared Semantic Resource for the Intelligence CommunityIn Barry Smith, Tatiana Malyuta, William S. Mandrick, Chia Fu, Kesny Parent & Milan Patel (eds.), Proceedings of the Conference on Semantic Technology in Intelligence, Defense and Security (STIDS), CEUR, . pp. 1-8. 2012.We describe a strategy that is being used for the horizontal integration of warfighter intelligence data within the framework of the US Army’s Distributed Common Ground System Standard Cloud (DSC) initiative. The strategy rests on the development of a set of ontologies that are being incrementally applied to bring about what we call the ‘semantic enhancement’ of data models used within each intelligence discipline. We show how the strategy can help to overcome familiar tendencies to stovepiping …Read more
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278Biomedical informatics and granularityComparative and Functional Genomics 5 (6-7): 501-508. 2004.An explicit formal-ontological representation of entities existing at multiple levels of granularity is an urgent requirement for biomedical information processing. We discuss some fundamental principles which can form a basis for such a representation. We also comment on some of the implicit treatments of granularity in currently available ontologies and terminologies (GO, FMA, SNOMED CT).
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255The Ontology of Processes and Functions: A Study of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and HealthIn Sharing Knowledge through the ICF: 13th Annual North American WHO Collaborating Center Conference on the ICF, Niagara Falls, June 7, 2007, North American Who Collaborating Center. 2007.The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health provides a classification of human bodily functions, which, while exhibiting non-conformance to many formal ontological principles, provides an insight into which basic functions such a classification should include. Its evaluation is an important first step towards such an adequate ontology of this domain. Presented at the 13th Annual North American WHO Collaborating Center Conference on the ICF, 2007.
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371On Creativity and the Philosophy of the Supranational StateIn Tamás Demeter (ed.), Essays on Wittgenstein and Austrian Philosophy: In Honour of J.C. Nyíri, Brill. pp. 25-39. 2004.Building on the writings of Wittgenstein on rule-following and deviance, Kristóf Nyíri advanced a theory of creativity as consisting in a fusion of conflicting rules or disciplines. Only such fusion can produce something that is both intrinsically new and yet capable of being apprehended by and passed on to a wider community. Creativity, on this view, involves not the breaking of rules, or the deliberate cultivation of deviant social habits, but rather the acceptance of enriched systems of rules…Read more
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691Searle and De Soto: The New Ontology of the Social WorldIn Barry Smith, David Mark & Isaac Ehrlich (eds.), The Mystery of Capital and the Construction of Social Reality, Open Court. pp. 35-51. 2008.Consider a game of blind chess between two chess masters that is recorded in some standard chess notation. The recording is a representation of the game. But what is the game itself? This question is, we believe, central to the entire domain of social ontology. We argue that the recorded game is a special sort of quasi-abstract pattern, something that is: (i) like abstract entities such as numbers or forms, in that it is both nonphysical and nonpsychological; but at the same time, (ii) through i…Read more
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308The Soul and Its Parts: A Study in Aristotle and BrentanoBrentano Studien 1. 1988.The piece of wax takes on the form of the seal; but this occurs in a way that is largely indifferent to the particular constitution of the seal. Similarly, Aristotle says, ‘the sense is affected by what is coloured or flavoured or sounding, but it is indifferent as to what in each case the substance is’. We show that Brentano takes this Aristotelian account of the relation between sense and its objects as the basis for his theory of mind in the Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint.
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6744Foundations of Gestalt Theory (edited book)Philosophia. 1988.In 1890 Christian von Ehrenfels published his classic paper "Über 'Gestaltqualitäten'", the first systematic investigation of the philosophy and psychology of Gestalt. Ehrenfels thereby issued an important challenge to the psychological atomism that was still predominant in his day. His paper not only exerted a powerful influence on the philosophy of the Meinong school, it also marked the beginning of the Gestalt tradition in psychology, later associated with the work of Wertheimer, Köhler and K…Read more
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526The Question of ApriorismAustrian Economics Newsletter (1/2): 1-5. 1990.We defend a view according to which Austrian economics rests on what can most properly be called an Aristotelian methodology. This implies a realist perspective, according to which the world exists independently of our thinking and reasoning activities; an essentialist perspective, according to which the world contains certain simple essences or natures which may come together in law-like ways to form more complex static and dynamic wholes, and an apriorist perspective, according to which given …Read more
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220Framework for formal ontologyTopoi 2 (1): 73-85. 1983.The discussions which follow rest on a distinction, first expounded by Husserl, between formal logic and formal ontology. The former concerns itself with (formal) meaning-structures; the latter with formal structures amongst objects and their parts. The paper attempts to show how, when formal ontological considerations are brought into play, contemporary extensionalist theories of part and whole, and above all the mereology of Leniewski, can be generalised to embrace not only relations between c…Read more
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614CARO: The Common Anatomy Reference OntologyIn Anatomy Ontologies for Bioinformatics: Principles and Practice, Springer. pp. 327-349. 2008.The Common Anatomy Reference Ontology (CARO) is being developed to facilitate interoperability between existing anatomy ontologies for different species, and will provide a template for building new anatomy ontologies. CARO has a structural axis of classification based on the top-level nodes of the Foundational Model of Anatomy. CARO will complement the developmental process sub-ontology of the GO Biological Process ontology, using it to ensure the coherent treatment of developmental stages, and…Read more
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1149Development of a Manufacturing Ontology for Functionally Graded MaterialsIn Francesco Furini, Rahul Rai, Barry Smith, Georgio Colombo & Venkat Krovi (eds.), Proceedings of International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE), . 2016.The development of manufacturing technologies for new materials involves the generation of a large and continually evolving volume of information. The analysis, integration and management of such large volumes of data, typically stored in multiple independently developed databases, creates significant challenges for practitioners. There is a critical need especially for open-sharing of data pertaining to engineering design which together with effective decision support tools can enable innovatio…Read more
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562MetaphysicsIn Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (ed.), Metaphysics: Five Questions, Automatic Press. pp. 143-158. 2010.Attempts to trace a unifying thread of ontological realism extending through 1. my early writings on Frege, Brentano, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Ingarden and (with Kevin Mulligan and Peter Simons) on truthmakers; 2. work on formal theories of the common-sense world, and on mereotopology, fiat objects, geographical categories, and environments (with David Mark, Roberto Casati, Achille Varzi), to 3. current work on applied ontology in biology and medicine, and on the theory of document acts and on the…Read more
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157An Essay on Material NecessityCanadian Journal of Philosophy (sup1): 301-322. 1992.Where Humeans rule out the possibility of material or non-logical necessity, and thus of any associated knowledge a priori, the German legal philosopher Adolf Reinach defends the existence of a wide class of material necessities falling within the domain of what can be known a priori, for example in fields such as color and shape, rational psychology, law and economics. Categories such as promise or claim or obligation are, in Reinach’s view, exist as nodes in a system of necessary relations, so…Read more
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315The formal ontology of boundariesElectronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy 5 (5). 1997.Revised version published as Barry Smith and Achille Varzi, “Fiat and Bona Fide Boundaries”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60: 2 (March 2000), 401–420.
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1692Do mountains exist? Towards an ontology of landformsEnvironment and Planning B (Planning and Design) 30 (3). 2003.Do mountains exist? The answer to this question is surely: yes. In fact, ‘mountain’ is the example of a kind of geographic feature or thing most commonly cited by English speakers (Mark, et al., 1999; Smith and Mark 2001), and this result may hold across many languages and cultures. But whether they are considered as individuals (tokens) or as kinds (types), mountains do not exist in quite the same unequivocal sense as do such prototypical everyday objects as chairs or people.
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94Universal Core Semantic LayerIn Barry Smith, Lowell Vizenor & James Schoening (eds.), Universal Core Semantic Layer, Ceur, Vol. 555. pp. 1-5. 2009.The Universal Core (UCore) is a central element of the National Information Sharing Strategy that is supported by multiple U.S. Federal Government Departments, by the intelligence community, and by a number of other national and international institutions. The goal of the UCore initiative is to foster information sharing by means of an XML schema providing consensus representations for four groups of universally understood terms under the headings who, what, when, and where. We here describe a p…Read more
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273Tracking Referents in Electronic Health RecordsStudies in Health Technology and Informatics 116. 2005.Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are organized around two kinds of statements: those reporting observations made, and those reporting acts performed. In neither case does the record involve any direct reference to what such statements are actually about. They record not: what is happening on the side of the patient, but rather: what is said about what is happening. While the need for a unique patient identifier is generally recognized, we argue that we should now move to an EHR regime in which a…Read more
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331Handbook of metaphysics and ontology (edited book)Philosophia Verlag. 1991.The Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology reflects the conviction that the history of metaphysics and current work in metaphysics and ontology can each throw valuable light on the other. Thus it is designed to serve both äs a means of making more widely accessible the results of recent scholarship in the history of philosophy, and also äs a unique work of reference in reladon to the metaphysical themes at the centre of much current debate in analyüc philosophy. The work contains more man 450 shor…Read more
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98Logic and the SachverhaltThe Monist 72 (1): 52-69. 1989.Those who conceive logic as a science have generally favoured one of two alternative conceptions as to what the subject-matter of this science ought to be. On the one hand is the nowadays somewhat old-fashioned-seeming view of logic as the science of judgment, or of thinking or reasoning activities in general. On the other hand is the view of logic as a science of ideal meanings, 'thoughts', or 'propositions in themselves'. There is, however, a third alternative conception, which enjoyed only a …Read more
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368Toward an Ontological Treatment of Disease and DiagnosisIn Proceedings of the 2009 AMIA Summit on Translational Bioinformatics, American Medical Informatics Association. 2009.Many existing biomedical vocabulary standards rest on incomplete, inconsistent or confused accounts of basic terms pertaining to diseases, diagnoses, and clinical phenotypes. Here we outline what we believe to be a logically and biologically coherent framework for the representation of such entities and of the relations between them. We defend a view of disease as involving in every case some physical basis within the organism that bears a disposition toward the execution of pathological process…Read more
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979Document ActsIn Anita Konzelmann-Ziv & Hans Bernhard Schmid (eds.), Institutions, Emotions, and Group Agents: Contributions to Social Ontology, Springer. pp. 19-31. 2014.The theory of document acts is an extension of the more traditional theory of speech acts advanced by Austin and Searle. It is designed to do justice to the ways in which documents can be used to bring about a variety of effects in virtue of the fact that, where speech is evanescent, documents are continuant entities. This means that documents can be preserved in such a way that they can be inspected and modified at successive points in time and grouped together into enduring document complexes.…Read more
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789Per una storia della teoria degli atti linguisticiIn Stefano Besoli & Luca Guidetti (eds.), Il realismo fenomenologico. Sulla filosofia dei circoli di Monaco e Gottinga, Quodlibet. pp. 385-418. 2000.Provides a survey of the development of speech act theory from Aristotle through Reid and Peirce to Edmund Husserl, Anton Marty, Johannes Daubert, Adolf Reinach, and finally to Austin and Searle. A special role is played by Husserl's theory of objectifying acts (meaning, roughly, acts of naming or stating) and of the efforts by his followers to extend this theory to cover phenomena such as questioning and commanding. These efforts culminated in the work of Adolf Reinach, who developed the first …Read more
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2686The Construction of Social Reality: An ExchangeAmerican Journal of Economics and Sociology 62 (2): 285-309. 2003.Part 1 of this exchange consists in a critique by Smith of Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality focusing on Searle’s use of the formula ‘X counts as Y in context C’. Smith argues that this formula works well for social objects such as dollar bills and presidents where the corresponding X terms (pieces of paper, human beings) are easy to identify. In cases such as debts and prices and money in a bank's computers, however, the formula fails, because these are cases of what he calls ‘free-s…Read more
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485Bodily Systems and the Spatial-Functional Structure of the Human BodyStudies in Health and Technology Informatics 102. 2004.The human body is a system made of systems. The body is divided into bodily systems proper, such as the endocrine and circulatory systems, which are subdivided into many sub-systems at a variety of levels, whereby all systems and subsystems engage in massive causal interaction with each other and with their surrounding environments. Here we offer an explicit definition of bodily system and provide a framework for understanding their causal interactions. Medical sciences provide at best informal …Read more
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89Truth and the visual fieldIn Jean Petitot, Francisco J. Varela, Bernard Pachoud & Jean-Michel Roy (eds.), Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, Stanford University Press. pp. 317-329. 1999.The paper uses the tools of mereotopology (the theory of parts, wholes and boundaries) to work out the implications of certain analogies between the 'ecological psychology' of J. J Gibson and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. It presents an ontological theory of spatial boundaries and of spatially extended entities. By reference to examples from the geographical sphere it is shown that both boundaries and extended entities fall into two broad categories: those which exist independently of our…Read more
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393The Environment Ontology: Contextualising biological and biomedical entitiesJournal of Biomedical Semantics 4 (43): 1-9. 2013.As biological and biomedical research increasingly reference the environmental context of the biological entities under study, the need for formalisation and standardisation of environment descriptors is growing. The Environment Ontology (ENVO) is a community-led, open project which seeks to provide an ontology for specifying a wide range of environments relevant to multiple life science disciplines and, through an open participation model, to accommodate the terminological requirements of all t…Read more
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1030The Varieties of Normativity: An Essay on Social OntologyIn Savas L. Tsohatzidis (ed.), Intentional Acts and Institutional Facts: Essays on John Searle’s Social Ontology, Springer. pp. 157-173. 2007.For much of the first fifty years of its existence, analytic philosophy shunned discussions of normativity and ethics. Ethical statements were considered as pseudo-propositions, or as expressions of pro- or con-attitudes of minor theoretical significance. Nowadays, in contrast, prominent analytic philosophers pay close attention to normative problems. Here we focus our attention on the work of Searle, at the same time drawing out an important connection between Searle’s work and that of two othe…Read more
Barry Smith
University at Buffalo
National Center for Ontological Research
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University at BuffaloDepartment of Philosophy
Biomedical Informatics
Neurology
Computer Science and EngineeringDistinguished Professor, Julian Park Chair -
National Center for Ontological ResearchAdministrator
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APA Eastern Division
Buffalo, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Ontology |
Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence |
Philosophy of Biology |