Barry Smith

University at Buffalo
National Center for Ontological Research
  • University at Buffalo
    Department of Philosophy
    Biomedical Informatics
    Neurology
    Computer Science and Engineering
    Distinguished Professor, Julian Park Chair
  • National Center for Ontological Research
    Administrator
  • Università della Svizzera Italiana
    Institute of Philosophy (ISFI)
    Visiting Professor (Part-time)
University of Manchester
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 1976
APA Eastern Division
CV
Buffalo, New York, United States of America
  •  6732
    Foundations 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
  •  437
    Living high and letting die
    Philosophy 76 (3): 435-442. 2001.
    Imagine that your body has become attached, without your permission, to that of a sick violinist. The violinist is a human being. He will die if you detach him. Such detachment seems, nonetheless, to be morally permissible. Thomson argues that an unwantedly pregnant woman is in an analogous situation. Her argument is considered by many to have established the moral permissibility of abortion even under the assumption that the foetus is a human being. Another popular argument is that presented by…Read more
  •  516
    The Question of Apriorism
    Austrian 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
  •  945
    Ingarden vs. Meinong on the logic of fiction
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 41 (1/2): 93-105. 1980.
    For Meinong, familiarly, fictional entities are not created, but rather merely discovered (or picked out) from the inexhaustible realm of Aussersein (beyond being and non-being). The phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, in contrast, offers in his Literary Work of Art of 1931 a constructive ontology of fiction, which views fictional objects as entities which are created by the acts of an author (as laws, for example, are created by acts of parliament). We outline the logic of fiction which is implied …Read more
  •  454
    Creating the ontologists of the future
    with Fabian Neuhaus, Elizabeth Florescu, Antony Galton, Michael Gruninger, Nicola Guarino, Leo Obrst, Arturo Sanchez, Amanda Vizedom, and Peter Yim
    Applied ontology 6 (1): 91-98. 2011.
    The goal of the 2010 Ontology Summit was to address the current shortage of persons with ontology expertise by developing a strategy for the education of ontologists. To achieve this goal we studied how ontologists are currently trained, the requirements identified by organizations that hire ontologists, and developments that might impact the training of ontologists in the future. We developed recommendations for the body of knowledge that should be taught and the skills that should be developed …Read more
  •  620
    Ontology for the Intelligence Analyst
    CrossTalk 14 (Nov/Dec): 18-25. 2012.
    As available intelligence data and information expand in both quantity and variety, new techniques must be deployed for search and analytics. One technique involves the semantic enhancement of data through the creation of what are called ‘ontologies’ or ‘controlled vocabularies.’ When multiple different bodies of heterogeneous data are tagged by means of terms from common ontologies, then these data become linked together in ways which allow more effective retrieval and integration. We describe …Read more
  •  437
    Boundaries: A Brentanian Theory
    Brentano Studien 8 107-114. 1998.
    According to Brentano's theory of boundaries, no boundary can exist without being connected with a continuum. But there is no specifiable part of the continuum, and no point, which is such that we may say that it is the existence of that part or of that point which conditions the boundary. - An adequate theory of the continuum must now recognize that boundaries be boundaries only in certain directions and not in others. This leads to consequences in other areas, too.
  •  974
    Document Acts
    In 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
  •  850
    The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations
    with Anita Bandrowski, Ryan Brinkman, Mathias Brochhausen, Matthew H. Brush, Bill Bug, Marcus C. Chibucos, Kevin Clancy, Mélanie Courtot, Dirk Derom, Michel Dumontier, Liju Fan, Jennifer Fostel, Gilberto Fragoso, Frank Gibson, Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran, Melissa A. Haendel, Yongqun He, Mervi Heiskanen, Tina Hernandez-Boussard, Mark Jensen, Yu Lin, Allyson L. Lister, Phillip Lord, James Malone, Elisabetta Manduchi, Monnie McGee, Norman Morrison, James A. Overton, Helen Parkinson, Bjoern Peters, Philippe Rocca-Serra, Alan Ruttenberg, Susanna-Assunta Sansone, Richard H. Scheuermann, Daniel Schober, Larisa N. Soldatova, Christian J. Stoeckert, Chris F. Taylor, Carlo Torniai, Jessica A. Turner, Randi Vita, Patricia L. Whetzel, and Jie Zheng
    PLoS 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
  •  313
    The formal ontology of boundaries
    Electronic 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.
  •  74
    How Not To Talk About What Does Not Exist
    In Rudolf Haller (ed.), Aesthetics, Hölder-pichler-tempsky. pp. 194-196. 1984.
    Defends a view of intentional directedness according to which those seemingly object-directed acts – involved for example in reading works of fiction – which lack existing objects as targets, are not intentional (thus: not directed towards any object). Rather, each such act seems to its subject as if it were so directed because it is associated with a belief of a certain special sort, whose intentional directedness is not towards any putative external object but rather towards the very act itsel…Read more
  •  351
    Universal Core Semantic Layer
    with Lowell Vizenor and James Schoening
    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
  •  1612
    Husserl’s Logical Investigations
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 27 (1): 199-207. 1986.
    The magisterial analyses of logic and meaning advanced in Husserl's Logical Investigations of 1900/01 have for a number of reasons been neglected by analytical philosophers in subsequent decades. This state of affairs has to do, in part, with the history of the editions and translations of Husserl's writings. Findlay's readable but imperfect translation appeared seventy years after the work itself was first published, and the editors and translators and expositors of Husserl's works have reflect…Read more
  •  859
    Handbook of metaphysics and ontology (edited book)
    with Hans Burkhardt
    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
  •  570
    Aristoteles, Kant und die Quantenphysik
    In 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.
  •  478
    Against idiosyncrasy in ontology development
    In B. Bennett & C. Fellbaum (eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS), Ios Press. pp. 15-26. 2006.
    The world of ontology development is full of mysteries. Recently, ISO Standard 15926 (“Lifecycle Integration of Process Plant Data Including Oil and Gas Production Facilities”), a data model initially designed to support the integration and handover of large engineering artefacts, has been proposed by its principal custodian for general use as an upper level ontology. As we shall discover, ISO 15926 is, when examined in light of this proposal, marked by a series of quite astonishing defects, whi…Read more
  •  2672
    The Construction of Social Reality: An Exchange
    American 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
  •  452
    German philosophy: Language and style
    Topoi 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
  •  367
    Truth and the visual field
    In 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
  •  690
    Representing Mental Functioning: Ontologies for Mental Health and Disease
    with Janna Hastings, Werner Ceusters, Mark Jensen, and Kevin Mulligan
    In 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
  •  1027
    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
  •  668
    Naive physics
    Philosophical 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
  •  676
    Definitions in ontologies
    with Selja Seppälä, Alan Ruttenberg, and Yonatan Schreiber
    Cahiers 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.
  •  263
    Vérifacteurs
    Etudes de Philosophie 9 104-138. 2008-2011.
    French translation of "Truth-Makers" (1984). A realist theory of truth for a class of sentence holds that there are entities in virtue of which these sentences are true or false. We call such entities ‘truthmakers’ and contend that those for a wide range of sentences about the real world are moments (dependent particulars). Since moments are unfamiliar we provide a definition and a brief philosophical history, anchoring them in our ontology by showing that they are objects of perception. The co…Read more
  •  1197
    Real Estate: Foundations of the Ontology of Property
    In 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
  •  63
    Surrounding Space
    with Achille C. Varzi
    Theory in Biosciences 121 (2): 139-162. 2002.
    The history of evolution is a history of development from less to more complex organisms. This growth in complexity of organisms goes hand in hand with a concurrent growth in complexity of environments and of organism-environment relations. It is a concern with this latter aspect of evolutionary development that motivates the present paper. We begin by outlining a theory of organism-environment relations. We then show that the theory can be applied to a range of different sorts of cases, both bi…Read more
  •  165
    Deferenza testuale
    Divus 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
  •  24
    Alexius Meinong, On Objects of Higher Order and Husserl's Phenomenology (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 30 (120): 252. 1980.
  •  280
    Edmund 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
  •  179
    Wittgensteinian Philosophy and the Culture of the Commentary
    In Rudolf Haller & Johannes Brandl (eds.), Wittgenstein: Towards a Re-Evaluation, Volume 2, Hölder-pichler-tempsky. pp. 247-254. 1990.
    The object of the present paper is the philosophical commentary, a form of literature that once predominated in all major philosophical cultures from classical Greece to Renaissance Italy, but which has more recently fallen into comparative disuse. Commentaries on the writings of German thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Marx and Heidegger have, certainly, kept the form alive to some extent in recent centuries; in the tradition of philosophy that was initiated by Descartes and Locke, however, and whi…Read more