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445Toward a Realistic Science of EnvironmentsEcological Psychology 21 (2): 121-130. 2009.The perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson embraces a radically externalistic view of mind and action. We have, for Gibson, not a Cartesian mind or soul, with its interior theater of contents and the consequent problem of explaining how this mind or soul and its psychological environment can succeed in grasping physical objects external to itself. Rather, we have a perceiving, acting organism, whose perceptions and actions are always already tuned to the parts and moments, the things and surfaces,…Read more
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766The Ontology for Biomedical InvestigationsPLoS ONE 11 (4). 2016.The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, …Read more
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1050Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology (edited book)Philosophia Verlag. 1982.A collection of material on Husserl's Logical Investigations, and specifically on Husserl's formal theory of parts, wholes and dependence and its influence in ontology, logic and psychology. Includes translations of classic works by Adolf Reinach and Eugenie Ginsberg, as well as original contributions by Wolfgang Künne, Kevin Mulligan, Gilbert Null, Barry Smith, Peter M. Simons, Roger A. Simons and Dallas Willard. Documents work on Husserl's ontology arising out of early meetings of the Seminar…Read more
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645Representing Mental Functioning: Ontologies for Mental Health and DiseaseIn Janna Hastings, Werner Ceusters, Mark Jensen, Kevin Mulligan & Barry Smith (eds.), Towards an Ontology of Mental Functioning (ICBO Workshop), Ceur. 2012.Mental and behavioral disorders represent a significant portion of the public health burden in all countries. The human cost of these disorders is immense, yet treatment options for sufferers are currently limited, with many patients failing to respond sufficiently to available interventions and drugs. High quality ontologies facilitate data aggregation and comparison across different disciplines, and may therefore speed up the translation of primary research into novel therapeutics. Realism-based…Read more
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638Naive physicsPhilosophical Psychology 7 (2). 1994.The project of a 'naive physics' has been the subject of attention in recent years above all in the artificial intelligence field, in connection with work on common-sense reasoning, perceptual representation and robotics. The idea of a theory of the common-sense world is however much older than this, having its roots not least in the work of phenomenologists and Gestalt psychologists such as K hler, Husserl, Schapp and Gibson. This paper seeks to show how contemporary naive physicists can profit…Read more
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618Basic Formal Ontology for bioinformaticsIFOMIS Reports. 2005.Two senses of ‘ontology’ can be distinguished in the current literature. First is the sense favored by information scientists, who view ontologies as software implementations designed to capture in some formal way the consensus conceptualization shared by those working on information systems or databases in a given domain. [Gruber 1993] Second is the sense favored by philosophers, who regard ontologies as theories of different types of entities (objects, processes, relations, functions) [Smith…Read more
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515Aristoteles, Kant und die QuantenphysikIn Ruth Hagengruber (ed.), Philosophie und Wissenschaft, Königshausen Und Neumann. pp. 79-97. 2002.Der folgende Vortrag hat zwei Teile. Teil 1 hat mit dem Internet zu tun und mit neuen Entwicklungen im Bereich des so genannten „ontological engineering“. Teil 2 hat zu tun mit der kantischen Philosophie und mit neuen Versuchen, diese Philosophie mit Hilfe der Quantenphysik zu unterstützen. Diese zwei Teile sind nicht vollkommen unabhängig voneinander, aber die Verbindung zwischen den zwei Teilen wird erst im Laufe des Vortrags klar werden.
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186Referent tracking for digital rights managementInternational Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies 2 (1): 45-53. 2007.Digital Rights Management (DRM) covers the description, identification, trading, protection, monitoring and tracking of all forms of rights over both tangible and intangible assets. The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) system provides a framework for the persistent identification of entities involved in this domain. Although the system has been very well designed to manage object identifiers, some important questions relating to the creation and assignment of identifiers are left open. The paradi…Read more
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9Ludwig Landgrebe, The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Six Essays (review)History and Philosophy of Logic 4 (1): 111. 1983.
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433German philosophy: Language and styleTopoi 10 (2): 155-161. 1991.The remarks which follow are intended to address a certain apparent asymmetry as between German and Anglo-Saxon philosophy. Put most simply, it is clear to every philosopher moving backwards and forwards between the two languages that the translation of an Anglo-Saxophone philosophical text into German is in general a much easier task than is the translation of a German philosophical text into English. The hypothesis suggests itself immediately that this is so because English philosophical writ…Read more
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515The structures of the common-sense worldActa Philosophica Fennica 58. 1995.While contemporary philosophers have devoted vast amounts of attention to the language we use in describing and finding our way about the world of everyday experience, they have, with few exceptions, refused to see this world itself as a fitting object of theoretical concern. In what follows I shall seek to show how the commonsensical world might be treated ontologically as an object of investigation in its own right. At the same time I shall seek to establish how such a treatment might help us …Read more
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259Edmund Husserl: Briefwechsel (Husserliana Dokumente III). (review)Husserl Studies 12 (1): 98-104. 1995.This edition of Husserl's correspondence comprises 10 volumes. Its philosophical core is contained in the first four volumes, which correspond to the four phases of Husserl's philosophical career: as follower of Brentano, as mentor of the realist phenomenologists in Munich (the founders of the 'phenomenological movement'), and as professor, successively, in Göttingen and Freiburg. The remaining five volumes pertain to HusserI's correspondence with philosophers and other scholars outside the inne…Read more
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420L’Autriche et la naissance de la philosophie scientifiqueActes de la Recherche En Sciences Sociales 109 (1). 1995.The term ‘Continental philosophy’ designates not philosophy on the continent of Europe as a whole, but rather a selective slice of Franco-German philosophy. Through a critical analysis of the arguments advanced by Otto Neurath, the paper addresses the issue of why Austrian philosophers in particular are not counted in the pantheon of Continental philosophers. Austrian philosophy is marked by the predominance of philosophical analysis and of the philosophy of science. The paper concludes that it …Read more
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386Layers: A New Approach to Locating Objects in SpaceIn W. Kuhn M. F. Worboys & S. Timpf (eds.), Spatial Information Theory: Foundations of Geographic Information Science, Springer. pp. 50-65. 2003.Standard theories in mereotopology focus on relations of parthood and connection among spatial or spatio-temporal regions. Objects or processes which might be located in such regions are not normally directly treated in such theories. At best, they are simulated via appeal to distributions of attributes across the regions occupied or by functions from times to regions. The present paper offers a richer framework, in which it is possible to represent directly the relations between entities of var…Read more
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635Definitions in ontologiesCahiers de Lexicologie 109 (2). 2016.Definitions vary according to context of use and target audience. They must be made relevant for each context to fulfill their cognitive and linguistic goals. This involves adapting their logical structure, type of content, and form to each context of use. We examine from these perspectives the case of definitions in ontologies.
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1142Real Estate: Foundations of the Ontology of PropertyIn Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Erik Stubjkaer & Christoph Schlieder (eds.), The Ontology and Modelling of Real Estate Transactions, Ashgate. pp. 51-67. 2003.Suppose you own a garden-variety object such as a hat or a shirt. Your property right then follows the ageold saw according to which possession is nine-tenths of the law. That is, your possession of a shirt constitutes a strong presumption in favor of your ownership of the shirt. In the case of land, however, this is not the case. Here possession is not only not a strong presumption in favor of ownership; it is not even clear what possession is. Possessing a thing like a hat or a shirt is a rath…Read more
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1213Formal ontology, common sense, and cognitive scienceInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies 43 (5-6). 1995.Common sense is on the one hand a certain set of processes of natural cognition - of speaking, reasoning, seeing, and so on. On the other hand common sense is a system of beliefs (of folk physics, folk psychology and so on). Over against both of these is the world of common sense, the world of objects to which the processes of natural cognition and the corresponding belief-contents standardly relate. What are the structures of this world? How does the scientific treatment of this world relate to…Read more
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145Deferenza testualeDivus Thomas 24 (3): 92-116. 1999.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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421The primacy of place: An investigation in Brentanian ontologyTopoi 8 (1): 43-51. 1989.What follows is an investigation of the ontology of Franz Brentano with special reference to Brentano's later and superficially somewhat peculiar doctrine to the effect that the substances of the material world are three dimensional places. Taken as a whole, Brentano's philosophy is marked by three, not obviously compatible, trait. In the first place, his work is rooted in the metaphysics of Aristotle, above all in Aristotle's substance/accident ontology and in the Aristotelian …Read more
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460The Unified Medical Language System and the Gene Ontology: Some critical reflectionsIn A. Günter, R. Kruse & B. Neumann (eds.), KI 2003: Advances in Artificial Intelligence, Springer. pp. 135-148. 2003.The Unified Medical Language System and the Gene Ontology are among the most widely used terminology resources in the biomedical domain. However, when we evaluate them in the light of simple principles for wellconstructed ontologies we find a number of characteristic inadequacies. Employing the theory of granular partitions, a new approach to the understanding of ontologies and of the relationships ontologies bear to instances in reality, we provide an application of this theory in relation to a…Read more
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2531Knowing How vs. Knowing ThatIn J. C. Nyíri & Barry Smith (eds.), Practical Knowledge: Outlines of a Theory of Traditions and Skills, Croom Helm. pp. 1-16. 1988.A sketch of the history of the opposition between propositional and practical knowledge is followed by a brief account of the relevant ideas of Merleau-Ponty, Polanyi, and H. and S. Dreyfus (on expertise and artificial intelligence). The paper concludes with a discussion of the work of Ryle on the notion of a ‘discipline’, drawing implications for a theory of traditions.
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503Granular Partitions and VaguenessIn Chris Welty & Barry Smith (eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS), Acm Press. pp. 309-320. 2003.There are some who defend a view of vagueness according to which there are intrinsically vague objects or attributes in reality. Here, in contrast, we defend a view of vagueness as a semantic property of names and predicates. All entities are crisp, on this view, but there are, for each vague name, multiple portions of reality that are equally good candidates for being its referent, and, for each vague predicate, multiple classes of objects that are equally good candidates for being its extensio…Read more
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390Theories of JudgmentIn Thomas Baldwin (ed.), The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870-1945, Cambridge University Press. pp. 157--173. 2003.The dominant theory of judgment in 1870 was one or other variety of combination theory: the act of judgment is an act of combining concepts or ideas in the mind of the judging subject. In the decades to follow a succession of alternative theories arose to address defects in the combination theory, starting with Bolzano’s theory of propositions in themselves, Brentano’s theory of judgment as affirmation or denial of existence, theories distinguishing judgment act from judgment content advanced by…Read more
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286Practices of ArtIn J. C. Nyíri & Barry Smith (eds.), Practical Knowledge: Outlines of a Theory of Traditions and Skills, Croom Helm. pp. 172-209. 1988.Starting out from the ontology of human work set out by Marx in Das Kapital, the paper seeks to analyse the relations between the artist and his actions and aims, the work of art he produces, and the audience for this work. The paper concludes with a discussion of the problem of creativity in the arts, drawing on ideas of Roman Ingarden and other phenomenologists.
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3233Beyond concepts: Ontology as reality representationIn Achille C. Varzi & Laure Vieu (eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS), . pp. 1-12. 2004.The present essay is devoted to the application of ontology in support of research in the natural sciences. It defends the thesis that ontologies developed for such purposes should be understood as having as their subject matter, not concepts, but rather the universals and particulars which exist in reality and are captured in scientific laws. We outline the benefits of a view along these lines by showing how it yields rigorous formal definitions of the foundational relations used in many influe…Read more
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1035Classifying Processes: An Essay in Applied OntologyRatio 25 (4): 463-488. 2012.We begin by describing recent developments in the burgeoning discipline of applied ontology, focusing especially on the ways ontologies are providing a means for the consistent representation of scientific data. We then introduce Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), a top-level ontology that is serving as domain-neutral framework for the development of lower level ontologies in many specialist disciplines, above all in biology and medicine. BFO is a bicategorial ontology, embracing both three-dimensiona…Read more
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208The Ecological Approach to Information ProcessingIn Kristóf Nyíri (ed.), Mobile Learning: Essays on Philosophy, Psychology and Education, Passagen Verlag. pp. 17--24. 2003.Imagine a 5-stone weakling whose brain has been loaded with all the knowledge of a champion tennis player. He goes to serve in his first match – Wham! – His arm falls off. The 5-stone weakling just doesn’t have the bone structure or muscular development to serve that hard. There are, clearly, different types of knowledge/ability/skill, only some of which are a matter of what can be transferred simply by passing signals down a wire from one brain (or computer) to another. Sometimes it is the body…Read more
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415Biomarkers in the Ontology for General Medical ScienceIn Ronald Cornet (ed.), Digital Healthcare Empowering Europeans, Ios Press. pp. 155-159. 2015.Based on the Ontology for General Medical Science, we propose definitions for biomarkers of various types of. These definitions provide not only a complete formal representation of what biomarkers are according to the Institute of Medicine (IOM), but also remove the ambiguities and inconsistencies encountered in the documentation provided by the IOM.
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236ItIn Rudolf Haller & Wolfgang Grassl (eds.), Language, Logic and Philosophy, Reidel. 1980.A brief study of the logical, linguistic, psychological and ontological problem of ‘impersonalia’, which is to say of assertions such as ‘it’s raining’ or ‘es blitzt’ which seem to have no subject. Such assertions cause problems not only for defenders of traditional subject-predicate views of assertive sentences, but also for those, such as Frege, who defended a view in terms of functions and arguments.
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433An Axiomatisation of Basic Formal Ontology with Projection FunctionsIn Kerry Taylor (ed.), Advances in Ontologies, Proceedings of the Sixth Australasian Ontology Workshop, University of Adelaide. pp. 71-80. 2010.This paper proposes a reformulation of the treatment of boundaries, at parts and aggregates of entities in Basic Formal Ontology. These are currently treated as mutually exclusive, which is inadequate for biological representation since some entities may simultaneously be at parts, boundaries and/or aggregates. We introduce functions which map entities to their boundaries, at parts or aggregations. We make use of time, space and spacetime projection functions which, along the way, allow us to de…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 |