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
  •  369
    On the Austrianness of Austrian economics
    Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 4 (1-2): 212-238. 1990.
    Much recent work on the intellectual background of Austrian economics reveals an unfortunate lack of awareness of the distinct nature of the Austrian contribution to philosophy, from which the Austrian economists drew many of their ideas. The present essay offers a sketch of this contribution, contrasting Austrian philosophy especially with the modes of philosophy dominant in Germany. This makes it possible to throw new light on the relations on Mises, Kant and the Vienna circle, and it allows u…Read more
  •  359
    Constraints on Correspondence
    In H. Rutte W. Sauer & W. Gombocz (eds.), Traditionen und Perspektiven der analytischen Philosophie. Festschrift für Rudolf Haller, Hölder/pichler/tempsky. pp. 415-430. 1989.
    My aim is to lay down some constraints on a correspondence theory of truth for empirical sentences of a natural language on the basis of a theory according to which that to which a true empirical sentence of such a language corresponds is a part of the natural world. The problem is to find some means of delineating those portions of the world which serve as correspondents, portions of reality otherwise called ‘truthmakers’.
  •  323
    Medical terminology collects and organizes the many different kinds of terms employed in the biomedical domain both by practitioners and also in the course of biomedical research. In addition to serving as labels for biomedical classes, these names reflect the organizational principles of biomedical vocabularies and ontologies. Some names represent invariant features (classes, universals) of biomedical reality (i.e., they are a matter for ontology). Other names, however, convey also how this rea…Read more
  •  96
    Brentano’s Ontology: From Conceptualism to Reism
    In Dale Jacquette (ed.), The Cambridge companion to Brentano, Cambridge University Press. pp. 197-220. 2004.
    It is often claimed that the beginnings of Brentano’s ontology were Aristotelian in nature; but this claim is only partially true. Certainly the young Brentano adopted many elements of Aristotle’s metaphysics, and he was deeply influenced by the Aristotelian way of doing philosophy. But he always interpreted Aristotle’s ideas in his own fashion. He accepted them selectively, and he used them in the service of ends that would not have been welcomed by Aristotle himself. The present paper is an ex…Read more
  •  299
    Horizontal Integration of Warfighter Intelligence Data: A Shared Semantic Resource for the Intelligence Community
    with Tatiana Malyuta, William S. Mandrick, Chia Fu, Kesny Parent, and Milan Patel
    In 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
  •  280
    Biomedical informatics and granularity
    with Anand Kumar
    Comparative 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).
  •  63
    A theory of divides
    The Analytic-Continental Divide Conference. 1999.
    Some would conceive philosophy as being divided into Analytic and Continental. This, as John Searle points out, is rather like conceiving America as being divided into Business and Kansas. Searle’s wise saying has not, as yet, received the theoretical attention it deserves. In both cases we have a certain domain, which is conceived as being divided into two parts, one defined in spatial terms, the other defined in terms of objects, practices or features widely spread through some spatial area. W…Read more
  •  954
    Rationality in Action: A Symposium
    Philosophical Explorations 4 (2): 66-94. 2001.
    Searle’s tool for understanding culture, law and society is the opposition between brute reality and institutional reality, or in other words between: observer-independent features of the world, such as force, mass and gravitational attraction, and observer-relative features of the world, such as money, property, marriage and government. The question posed here is: under which of these two headings do moral concepts fall? This is an important question because there are moral facts – for example …Read more
  •  375
    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
  •  310
    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.
  •  63
    Biomedical research is increasingly a matter of the navigation through large computerized information resources deriving from functional genomics or from the biochemistry of disease pathways. To make such navigation possible, controlled vocabularies are needed in terms of which data from different sources can be unified. One of the most influential developments in this regard is the so-called Gene Ontology, which consists of controlled vocabularies of terms used by biologists to describe cellula…Read more
  •  674
    A Spatio-Temporal Ontology for Geographic Information Integration
    International Journal for Geographical Information Science 23 (6): 765-798. 2009.
    This paper presents an axiomatic formalization of a theory of top-level relations between three categories of entities: individuals, universals, and collections. We deal with a variety of relations between entities in these categories, including the sub-universal relation among universals and the parthood relation among individuals, as well as cross-categorial relations such as instantiation and membership. We show that an adequate understanding of the formal properties of such relations – in pa…Read more
  •  620
    CARO: The Common Anatomy Reference Ontology
    with Melissa Haendel, Fabian Neuhaus, David Osumi-Sutherland, Paula M. Mabee, José L. V. Mejino Jr, and Chris J. Mungall
    In Haendel Melissa, A. Neuhaus, Fabian Osumi-Sutherland, David Mabee, Paula M., Mejino Jr José L. V., Mungall Chris, J. Smith & Barry (eds.), 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
  •  266
    Sämtliche Werke: Textkritische Ausgabe in 2 Bänden
    with Adolf Reinach and Karl Schuhmann
    Philosophia. 1989.
    The last decade has witnessed the beginnings of a remarkable convergence of Husserlian phenonenology and analytic philosophy of language, and the present volumes provide original and important texts of the phenomenological philosophy of language. Powerfully influenced by the writings of the early Husserl, Reinach fashioned Husserl’s ideas into a rigorous analytical methodology of his own, which he applied in particular to problems in logic and the theory of knowledge, and to the philosophies of …Read more
  •  459
    Towards a Science of Emerging Media
    In 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
  •  562
    Metaphysics
    In Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (ed.), Metaphysics: 5 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
  •  640
    An Essay on Material Necessity
    Canadian 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
  •  494
    Putting the World Back into Semantics
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 44 (1): 91-109. 1993.
    To what in reality do the logically simple sentences with empirical content correspond? Two extreme positions can be distinguished in this regard: 'Great Fact' theories, such as are defended by Davidson; and trope-theories, which see such sentences being made the simply by those events or states to which the relevant main verbs correspond. A position midway between these two extremes is defended, one according to which sentences of the given sort are made tme by what are called 'dependence struc…Read more
  •  38
    Zum Wesen des Common sense: Aristoteles und die naive Physik
    Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 46 (4). 1992.
    In ancient times was known two kinds of physics. On one side there was the astronomy , which is characterized by the use of exact mathematical principles, on the other hand, there was the physics in the true sense of the word, a science, which coincides often with what we now call `metaphysics' . While astronomy has to do with the region of celestials and the imperishable, the physics is about the range of the sublunary, terrestrial things that come and go, and from their movements. The physicis…Read more
  •  1339
    Framework for formal ontology
    Topoi 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
  •  274
    Tracking Referents in Electronic Health Records
    with Werner Ceusters
    Studies 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
  •  256
    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.
  •  693
    Searle and De Soto: The New Ontology of the Social World
    In Barry Smith, David M. 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
  •  689
    Logic and the Sachverhalt
    The 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
  •  369
    Toward an Ontological Treatment of Disease and Diagnosis
    with Richard H. Scheuermann and Werner Ceusters
    In Richard H. Scheuermann, Werner Ceusters & Barry Smith (eds.), Toward an Ontological Treatment of Disease and Diagnosis, 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
  •  105
    Legal ontology and the problem of normativity
    The 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
  •  445
    The Theory of Value of Christian von Ehrenfels
    In 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
  •  791
    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
  •  1693
    Do mountains exist? Towards an ontology of landforms
    with David Mark
    Environment 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.
  •  3244
    John Searle: From speech acts to social reality
    In John Searle, Cambridge University Press. pp. 1-33. 2003.
    We provide an overview of Searle's contributions to speech act theory and the ontology of social reality, focusing on his theory of constitutive rules. In early versions of this theory, Searle proposed that all such rules have the form 'X counts as Y in context C' formula – as for example when Barack Obama (X) counts as President of the United States (Y) in the context of US political affairs. Crucially, the X and the Y terms are here identical. A problem arises for this theory for cases involvi…Read more