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316Towards an Ontology of Mental Functioning (ICBO Workshop)In Janna Hastings, Werner Ceusters, Mark Jensen, Kevin Mulligan & Barry Smith (eds.), Proceeedings of the Third International Conference on Biomedical Ontology, . 2012.
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J. MacNamara: A Border Dispute. The Place of Logic in Psychology (review)History and Philosophy of Logic 9 (1): 126. 1988.
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12N. Martin and S. Pollard, Closure spaces and logic (review)History and Philosophy of Logic 17 176-177. 1996.
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M. A. Notturno, Perspectives on Psychologism (review)History and Philosophy of Logic 12 (2): 249. 1991.
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13Liberal Education in a Knowledge Society (edited book)Open Court. 2002.Liberal education was once governed by a canon, a recognized body of knowledge considered essential for transmission from one generation to the next. These essays examine the plight of modern educational theory in a world trying to cope with information overload without the guidance of a canon. Contributors include Carl Bereiter, Gordon Wells, and James Miller.
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Introduction: International Medical Informatics Association Working Group 6 and the 2005 Rome ConferenceJournal of Biomedical Informatics 39 (3): 249-251. 2006.
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248Controlled and uncontrolled English for ontology editingSemantic Technology for Intelligence, Defense and Security 1523 74-81. 2015.Ontologies formally represent reality in a way that limits ambiguity and facilitates automated reasoning and data fusion, but is often daunting to the non-technical user. Thus, many researchers have endeavored to hide the formal syntax and semantics of ontologies behind the constructs of Controlled Natural Languages (CNLs), which retain the formal properties of ontologies while simultaneously presenting that information in a comprehensible natural language format. In this paper, we build upon pr…Read more
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215Ontology-based integration of medical coding systems and electronic patient recordsIFOMIS Reports. 2004.In the last two decades we have witnessed considerable efforts directed towards making electronic healthcare records comparable and interoperable through advances in record architectures and (bio)medical terminologies and coding systems. Deep semantic issues in general, and ontology in particular, have received some interest from the research communities. However, with the exception of work on so-called ‘controlled vocabularies’, ontology has thus far played little role in work on standardizatio…Read more
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21615OntologyIn Luciano Floridi (ed.), Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information, Blackwell. pp. 155-166. 2003.Ontology as a branch of philosophy is the science of what is, of the kinds and structures of objects, properties, events, processes and relations in every area of reality. ‘Ontology’ in this sense is often used by philosophers as a synonym of ‘metaphysics’ (a label meaning literally: ‘what comes after the Physics’), a term used by early students of Aristotle to refer to what Aristotle himself called ‘first philosophy’. But in recent years, in a development hardly noticed by philosophers, the ter…Read more
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186De la modification de la sensibilité: L’esthétique de l’Ecole de GrazRevue D’Esthétique 9 19--37. 1985.The most obvious varieties of mental phenomena directed to non- existent objects occur in our experiences of works of art. The task of applying the Meinongian ontology of the non-existent to the working out of a theory of aesthetic phenomena was however carried out not by Meinong by his disciple Stephan Witasek in his Grundzüge der allgemeinen Ästhetik of 1904. Witasek shows in detail how our feelings undergo certain sorts of structural modifications when they are directed towards what does not …Read more
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623On the Origins of Analytic Philosophy (review)Grazer Philosophische Studien 35 (1): 153-173. 1989.Analytic philosophers have until recently been reluctant to pursue historical investigations into the Central European roots of their own philosophical tradition. The most recent book by Michael Dummett, however, entitled Origins of Analytic Philosophy, shows how fruitful such investigations can be, not only as a means of coming to see familiar philosophical problems in a new light, but also as a means of clarifying what, precisely, ‘analytic philosophy’ might mean. As Dummett points out, the ne…Read more
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709Introduction to Adolf Reinach, ‘On the Theory of the Negative Judgment’In Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology, Philosophia Verlag. pp. 289-313. 1982.Reinach’s essay of 1911 establishes an ontological theory of logic, based on the notion of Sachverhalt or state of affairs. He draws on the theory of meaning and reference advanced in Husserl’s Logical Investigations and at the same time anticipates both Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and later speech act theorists’ ideas on performative utterances. The theory is used by Reinach to draw a distinction between two kinds of negative judgment: the simple negative judgment, which is made true by a negative…Read more
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328IntroductionIn Barry Smith & David Woodruff Smith (eds.), The Cambridge companion to Husserl, Cambridge University Press. 1995.Husserl’s philosophy, by the usual account, evolved through three stages: 1. development of an anti-psychologistic, objective foundation of logic and mathematics, rooted in Brentanian descriptive psychology; 2. development of a new discipline of "phenomenology" founded on a metaphysical position dubbed "transcendental idealism"; transformation of phenomenology from a form of methodological solipsism into a phenomenology of intersubjectivity and ultimately (in his Crisis of 1936) into an ontology…Read more
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760Gestalt psychologyIn Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Genealogy to Iqbal, Routledge. pp. 51-54. 1998.The term ‘Gestalt’ was introduced into psychology by the Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels in an essay entitled “On ‘Gestalt-Qualities’” published in 1890. ‘Gestalt,’ in colloquial German, means roughly: ‘shape’ or ‘structure’ or ‘configuration’, and Ehrenfels demonstrates in his essay that there are certain inherently structural features of experience which need to be acknowledged in addition to simple tones, colours and other mental ‘atoms’ or ‘elements’. His essay thus initiated a …Read more
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480Explications vérifactionnistesPhilosophiques 38 (1): 177-194. 2011.Le présent article est une tentative nouvelle d’articuler le rôle d’une théorie des vérifacteurs. Nous soutenons que la théorie de la vérifaction constitue une pierre angulaire dans une bonne méthodologie en métaphysique, mais que l’amalgame entre la théorie de la vérifaction et la théorie de la vérité a été responsable de certains excès associés aux approches vérifactionnistes dans la littérature récente. Nous montrons que la théorie de la vérifaction conserve son attrait comme instrument d’inv…Read more
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1248Austrian Economics and Austrian PhilosophyIn Smith W. Grassl and B. (ed.), Austrian Economics and Austrian Philosophy, Helm Croom. pp. 1-36. 1986.Austrian economics starts out from the thesis that the objects of economic science differ from those of the natural sciences because of the centrality of the economic agent. This allows a certain a priori or essentialistic aspect to economic science of a sort which parallels the a priori dimension of psychology defended by Brentano and his student Edmund Husserl. We outline these parallels, and show how the theory of a priori dependence relations outlined in Husserl’s Logical Investigations can …Read more
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178К непереводимости немецкой философииLogos. Anales Del Seminario de Metafísica [Universidad Complutense de Madrid, España] 5 124-139. 2000.Works of philosophy written in English have spawned a massive secondary literature dealing with ideas, problems or arguments. But they have almost never given rise to works of ‘commentary’ in the strict sense, a genre which is however a dominant literary form not only in the Confucian, Vedantic, Islamic, Jewish and Scholastic traditions, but also in relation to more recent German-language philosophy. Yet Anglo-Saxon philosophers have themselves embraced the commentary form when dealing with Gree…Read more
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425Referent Tracking (RT) advocates the use of instance unique identifiers to refer to the entities comprising the subject matter of patient health records. RT promises many benefits to those who use health record data to improve patient care. To further the adoption of the paradigm we provide an illustration of how data from an EHR application needs to be decomposed in order to make it accord with the tenets of RT. We describe the ontological principles on which this decomposition is based in orde…Read more
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599An Ontological Approach to Territorial DisputesIn Neil Otte, Brian Donohue & Barry Smith (eds.), Semantic Technology in Intelligence, Defense and Security (STIDS), CEUR, vol. 1304, Ceur. pp. 2-9. 2014.Disputes over territory are a major contributing factor to the disruption of international relations. We believe that a cumulative, integrated, and continuously updated resource providing information about such disputes in an easily accessible form would be of benefit to intelligence analysts, military strategists, political scientists, and also to historians and others concerned with international disputes. We propose an ontology-based strategy for creating such a resource. The resource will co…Read more
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182WahrmacherSwiss Philosophical Preprints. 2009.Als zu Beginn des Jahrhunderts der Realismus wieder ernst genommen wurde, gab es viele Philosophen, die sich mit der Ontologie der Wahrheit befaßten. Unabhängig von der Bestimmung der Wahrheit als Korrespondenzbeziehung wollten sie herausfinden, inwieweit zur Erklärung der Wahrheit von Sätzen besondere Entitäten herangezogen werden müssen. Einige dieser Entitäten, so zum Beispiel Bolzanos ‘Sätze an sich’, Freges ‘Gedanken’ oder die ‘propositions’ von Russell und Moore, wurden als Träger der Eige…Read more
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Mach şi Ehrenfels. Fundamentele teoriei gestaltisteIn C. Stoenescu & I. Tanasescu (eds.), Filosofia Austriacă, Pelican. 2005.Ernst Mach's atomistic theory of sensation faces problems in doing justice to our ability to perceive and remember complex phenomena such as melodies and shapes. Christian von Ehrenfels attempted to solve these problems with his theory of "Gestalt qualities", which he sees as entities depending one-sidedly on the corresponding simple objects of sensation. We explore the theory of dependence relations advanced by Ehrenfels and show how it relates to the views on the objects of perception advanced…Read more
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344Oncology ontology in the NCI ThesaurusArtificial Intelligence in Medicine 213-220. 2005.The National Cancer Institute’s Thesaurus (NCIT) has been created with the goal of providing a controlled vocabulary which can be used by specialists in the various sub-domains of oncology. It is intended to be used for purposes of annotation in ways designed to ensure the integration of data and information deriving from these various sub-domains, and thus to support more powerful cross-domain inferences. In order to evaluate its suitability for this purpose, we examined the NCIT’s treatment of…Read more
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512Bridging the gap between medical and bioinformatics: An ontological case study in colon carcinomaComputers in Biology and Medicine 36 (7): 694--711. 2006.Ontological principles are needed in order to bridge the gap between medical and biological information in a robust and computable fashion. This is essential in order to draw inferences across the levels of granularity which span medicine and biology, an example of which include the understanding of the roles of tumor markers in the development and progress of carcinoma. Such information integration is also important for the integration of genomics information with the information contained in t…Read more
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370Quality Control for Terms and Definitions in Ontologies and TaxonomiesBMC Bioinformatics 7 (212): 1-12. 2006.Background: Ontologies and taxonomies are among the most important computational resources for molecular biology and bioinformatics. A series of recent papers has shown that the Gene Ontology (GO), the most prominent taxonomic resource in these fields, is marked by flaws of certain characteristic types, which flow from a failure to address basic ontological principles. As yet, no methods have been proposed which would allow ontology curators to pinpoint flawed terms or definitions in ontologies …Read more
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585The Neurological Disease OntologyJournal of Biomedical Semantics 4 (42): 42. 2013.We are developing the Neurological Disease Ontology (ND) to provide a framework to enable representation of aspects of neurological diseases that are relevant to their treatment and study. ND is a representational tool that addresses the need for unambiguous annotation, storage, and retrieval of data associated with the treatment and study of neurological diseases. ND is being developed in compliance with the Open Biomedical Ontology Foundry principles and builds upon the paradigm established by…Read more
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686In Silico Approaches and the Role of Ontologies in Aging ResearchRejuvenation Research 16 (6): 540-546. 2013.The 2013 Rostock Symposium on Systems Biology and Bioinformatics in Aging Research was again dedicated to dissecting the aging process using in silico means. A particular focus was on ontologies, as these are a key technology to systematically integrate heterogeneous information about the aging process. Related topics were databases and data integration. Other talks tackled modeling issues and applications, the latter including talks focussed on marker development and cellular stress as well as …Read more
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250Formal ontologies of space and time. IFOMIS ReportIn Thomas Bittner & Barry Smith (eds.), IFOMIS Report, . 2003.We propose an ontological theory that is powerful enough to describe both complex spatio-temporal processes (occurrents) and the enduring entities (continuants) that participate in such processes. For this purpose we distinguish between meta-ontology and token ontologies. Token ontologies fall into two major categories: ontologies of type SPAN and ontologies of type SNAP. These represent two complementary perspectives on reality and result in distinct though compatible systems of categories. The…Read more
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474Truth-MakersSwiss Philosophical Preprints. 2009.During the realist revival in the early years of this century, philosophers of various persuasions were concerned to investigate the ontology of truth. That is, whether or not they viewed truth as a correspondence, they were interested in the extent to which one needed to assume the existence of entities serving some role in accounting for the truth of sentences. Certain of these entities, such as the Sätze an sich of Bolzano, the Gedanken of Frege, or the propositions of Russell and Moore, were…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 |