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393Foundations for a Realist Ontology of Mental DiseaseJournal of Biomedical Semantics 1 (10): 1-23. 2010.While classifications of mental disorders have existed for over one hundred years, it still remains unspecified what terms such as 'mental disorder', 'disease' and 'illness' might actually denote. While ontologies have been called in aid to address this shortfall since the GALEN project of the early 1990s, most attempts thus far have sought to provide a formal description of the structure of some pre-existing terminology or classification, rather than of the corresponding structures and processe…Read more
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449Kraus on Weininger, Kraus on Women, Kraus on SerbiaIn Wolfgang Huemer & Marc-Oliver Schuster (eds.), Writing the Austrian Traditions: Relations Between Philosophy and Literature, University of Alberta Press. pp. 81-100. 2003.Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character interprets Kant’s categorical imperative in a way which takes it to imply that all human relations, including human sexual relations, are immoral; it is thus in a certain sense impossible to lead a moral life on this earth. We discuss Weininger’s ideas on man, woman, value and intellect, and describe their influence among the Central European intellectuals of his day, including Wittgenstein, and also including Karl Kraus.
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263VérifacteursEtudes 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
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358On the Austrianness of Austrian economicsCritical 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
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433Logic and formal ontologyManuscrito 23 (2): 275-323. 2000.Revised version of chapter in J. N. Mohanty and W. McKenna (eds.), Husserl’s Phenomenology: A Textbook, Lanham: University Press of America, 1989, 29–67. Logic for Husserl is a science of science, a science of what all sciences have in common in their modes of validation. Thus logic deals with universal laws relating to truth, to deduction, to verification and falsification, and with laws relating to theory as such, and to what makes for theoretical unity, both on the side of the propositions of…Read more
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341Constraints on CorrespondenceIn 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’.
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369The Soul and Its Parts: Varieties of InexistenceBrentano-Studien 4. 1992.From the point of view of Brentano’s philosophy, contemporary philosophy of mind presupposes an over-crude theory of the internal structures of mental acts and states and of the corresponding types of parts, unity and dependence. We here describe Brentano’s own account of the part-whole structures obtaining in the mental sphere, and show how it opens up new possibilities for mereological investigation. One feature of Brentano’s view is that the objects of experience are themselves parts of mind,…Read more
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319The Ontology-Epistemology Divide: A Case Study in Medical TerminologyIn Achille Varzi & Laure Vieu (eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems. Proceedings of the Third International Conference (FOIS 2004), Ios Press. 2004.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
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616In defense of extreme (fallibilistic) apriorismJournal of Libertarian Studies 12 (1). 1996.We presuppose a position of scientific realism to the effect (i) that the world exists and (ii) that through the working out of ever more sophisticated theories our scientific picture of reality will approximate ever more closely to the world as it really is. Against this background consider, now, the following question: 1. Do the empirical theories with the help of which we seek to approximate a good or true picture of reality rest on any non-empirical presuppositions? One can answer this quest…Read more
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256Biomedizinische Ontologie: Wissen strukturieren für den Informatik-Einsatz (edited book)Vdf Hochschulverlag. 2008.Dieses Buch betritt Neuland. Es ist eine Einführung in das neue Gebiet der angewandten Ontologie, jenem multidisziplinären Arbeitsgebiet, in dem Philosophen gemeinsam mit Informatikern und Vertretern der jeweils thematischen Wissenschaftsbereiche, in unserem Fall mit Biologen und Medizinern, daran arbeiten, wissenschaftliches Wissen informationstechnisch zu repräsentieren. Es zeigt, wie Philosophie eine praktische Anwendung findet, die von zunehmender Wichtigkeit nicht nur in den heutigen Lebens…Read more
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654The Protein Ontology: A structured representation of protein forms and complexesNucleic Acids Research 39 (1). 2011.The Protein Ontology (PRO) provides a formal, logically-based classification of specific protein classes including structured representations of protein isoforms, variants and modified forms. Initially focused on proteins found in human, mouse and Escherichia coli, PRO now includes representations of protein complexes. The PRO Consortium works in concert with the developers of other biomedical ontologies and protein knowledge bases to provide the ability to formally organize and integrate repres…Read more
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369On 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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995Fiat and Bona Fide Boundaries: Towards an Ontology of Spatially Extended ObjectsIn Stephen Hirtle & Andrew U. Frank (eds.), Spatial Information Theory: International Conference COSIT ‘97, Springer. 1997.Human cognitive acts are directed towards objects extended in space of a wide range of different types. What follows is a new proposal for bringing order into this typological clutter. The theory of spatially extended objects should make room not only for the objects of physics but also for objects at higher levels, including the objects of geography and of related disciplines. It should leave room for different types of boundaries, including both the bona fide boundaries which we find in the ph…Read more
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303The 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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331The New European PhilosophyIn János Kristóf Nyíri & Barry Smith (eds.), Philosophy and Political Change in Eastern Europe, Hegeler Institute. pp. 165-170. 1993.The paper seeks to indicate ways in which the crude distinction between Anglo-Saxon and Continental philosophy may have to be amended in light of recent developments in Eastern Europe. As is well known, the philosophy of science is to no small part a product of the universities of the Habsburg Empire (in Vienna, Prague, Lemberg/Lwow, etc.). Logic, too, has played a more significant role in Eastern Europe (not least in Poland) than in the philosophical cultures of Germany or France. For these and…Read more
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295Horizontal 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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497Assessing Ontologies: The Question of Human Origins and Its Ethical SignificanceIn Edmund Runggaldier, Christian Kanzian & Josef Quitterer (eds.), Persons: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Öbvhpt. pp. 243--259. 2003.In their paper “Sixteen Days” Barry Smith and Berit Brogaard try to answer the question: when does a human being begin to exist? In this paper we will address some methodological issues connected with this exercise in ontology. We shall begin by sketching the argument of “Sixteen Days”. We shall then attempt to characterize what is special about the ontological realism of “Sixteen Days” as contrasted to the linguistic constructivism which represents the more dominant current in contemporary anal…Read more
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276Biomedical 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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682BiometaphysicsIn Robin Le Poidevin, Simons Peter, McGonigal Andrew & Ross P. Cameron (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics, Routledge. pp. 537-544. 2009.While Darwin is commonly supposed to have demonstrated the inapplicability of the Aristotelian ontology of species to biological science, recent developments, especially in the wake of the Human Genome Project, have given rise to a new golden age of classification in which ontological ideas -- as for example in the Gene Ontology, the Cell Ontology, the Protein Ontology, and so forth -- are once again playing an important role. In regard to species, on the other hand, matters are more complex. We…Read more
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625An 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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414Textual DeferenceAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 28 (1). 1991.It is a truism that the attitude of deference to the text plays a lesser role in Anglo-Saxon philosophy than in other philosophical traditions. Works of philosophy written in English have, it is true, spawned a massive secondary literature dealing with the ideas, problems or arguments they contain. 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 …Read more
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294We provide a methodology for the creation of ontological partitions in biomedicine and we test the methodology via an application to the phenomenon of blood pressure. An ontology of blood pressure must do justice to the complex networks of intersecting pathways in the organism by which blood pressure is regulated. To this end it must deal not only with the anatomical structures and physiological processes involved in such regulation but also with the relations between these at different levels o…Read more
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1321Framework 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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577A Theory of Granular PartitionsIn Matt Duckham, Michael F. Goodchild & Michael Worboys (eds.), Foundations of Geographic Information Science, Taylor & Francis. pp. 117-151. 2003.We have a variety of different ways of dividing up, classifying, mapping, sorting and listing the objects in reality. The theory of granular partitions presented here seeks to provide a general and unified basis for understanding such phenomena in formal terms that is more realistic than existing alternatives. Our theory has two orthogonal parts: the first is a theory of classification; it provides an account of partitions as cells and subcells; the second is a theory of reference or intentional…Read more
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605CARO: 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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555MetaphysicsIn 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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365Toward 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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410The Benefits of Realism: A Realist Logic with ApplicationsIn Katherine Munn & Barry Smith (eds.), Applied Ontology: An Introduction, Ontos. pp. 109-124. 2008.We propose a formalization of a realist ontology using first order logic with identity and allowing quantification over terms representing both individuals and universals. In addition to identity, the ontology includes also relational predicates such as subtype, instantiation, parthood, location, and inherence. Inspired in part by Davidson’s treatment of events, the ontology includes also various relations linking events to their participants and to the times at which they occur.
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784Per 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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196Referent tracking for treatment optimisation in schizophrenic patientsJournal of Web Semantics 4 (3): 229-236. 2006.The IPAP Schizophrenia Algorithm was originally designed in the form of a flow chart to help physicians optimise the treatment of schizophrenic patients. We examined the current version from the perspective of recent work on terminologies and ontologies thereby drawing on the resources of Basic Formal Ontology, and this with the objective to make the algorithm appropriate for Semantic Web applications. We found that Basic Formal Ontology is a rich enough theory to represent all the entities invo…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 |