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1Interdisciplinary Ontology, Vol. 3: Proceedings of the Third Interdisciplinary Ontology Meeting (edited book)Keio University Press. 2010.
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571Laws of Essence or Constitutive Rules? Reinach vs. Searle on the Ontology of Social EntitiesIn Francesca De Vecchi (ed.), Eidetica del Diritto e Ontologia Sociale. Il Realismo di Adolf Reinach, Mimesis. pp. 83-108. 2012.Amongst the entities making up social reality, are there necessary relations whose necessity is not a mere reflection of the logical connections between corresponding concepts? We distinguish three main groups of answers to this question, associated with Hume and Adolf Reinach at opposite extremes, and with Searle who occupies a position somewhere in the middle. We first set forth Reinach’s views on what he calls ‘material necessities’ in the realm of social entities. We then attempt to show tha…Read more
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415The Role of Foundational Relations in the Alignment of Biomedical OntologiesIn M. Fieschi, E. Coiera & Y.-C. J. Li (eds.), Medinfo, Ios Press. pp. 444-448. 2004.The Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) symbolically represents the structural organization of the human body from the macromolecular to the macroscopic levels, with the goal of providing a robust and consistent scheme for classifying anatomical entities that is designed to serve as a reference ontology in biomedical informatics. Here we articulate the need for formally clarifying the is-a and part-of relations in the FMA and similar ontology and terminology systems. We diagnose certain characte…Read more
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1199Austrian and Hungarian Philosophy: On the Logic of Wittgenstein and PaulerIn Anne Reboul (ed.), Mind, Meaning and Metaphysics. Philosophical Papers Dedicated to Kevin Mulligan, Springer. pp. 387-486. 2014.As Kevin Mulligan, more than anyone else, has demonstrated, there is a distinction within the philosophy of the German-speaking world between two principal currents: of idealism / transcendentalism, characteristic of Northern Germany; and of realism / objectivism, characteristic of Austria and the South. We explore some of the implications of this distinction with reference to the influence of Austrian (and German) philosophy on philosophical developments in Hungary, focusing on the work of Ákos…Read more
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19Review of Ernest Davis: Representations of Commonsense Knowledge (review)Minds and Machines 4 (2): 245-249. 1994.Review of a compendium of alternative formal representations of common-sense knowledge. The book is centered largely on formal representations drawn from first-order logic, and thus lies in the tradition of Kenneth Forbus, Patrick Hayes and Jerry Hobbs.
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41Austrian Economics (Routledge Revivals): Historical and Philosophical Background (edited book)Croom Helm / Routledge. 1986.First published in 1986 and reprinted in 2010 in the Routledge Revivals series, this book presents the first detailed confrontation between the Austrian school of economics and Austrian philosophy, especially the philosophy of the Brentano school. It contains a study of the roots of Austrian economics in the liberal political theory of the nineteenth-century Hapsburg empire, and a study of the relations between the general theory of value underlying Austrian economics and the new economic approa…Read more
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1108Frege and Husserl: The Ontology of ReferenceJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 9 (2). 1978.Analytic philosophers apply the term ‘object’ both to concreta and to abstracta of certain kinds. The theory of objects which this implies is shown to rest on a dichotomy between object-entities on the one hand and meaning-entities on the other, and it is suggested that the most adequate account of the latter is provided by Husserl’s theory of noemata. A two-story ontology of objects and meanings (concepts, classes) is defended, and Löwenheim’s work on class-representatives is cited as an indica…Read more
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388Persistence and Ontological PluralismIn Christian Kanzian (ed.), Persistence, Ontos. pp. 33-48. 2007.We aim to provide the ontological grounds for an adequate account of persistence. We defend a perspectivalist, or moderate pluralist, position, according to which some aspects of reality can be accounted for in ontological terms only via partial and mutually complementary ontologies, each one of which captures some relevant aspect of reality. Our thesis here is that this is precisely the sort of ontological account that is needed for the understanding of persistence, specifically an account invo…Read more
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39Kamikaze – und der WestenIn Georg Meggle (ed.), Terror und der Krieg gegen ihn: Öffentliche Reflexionen, Mentis. pp. 107-118. 2003.Vor dem Hintergrund einer von Durkheim ausgehenden Selbstmordarten-Typologie wird das Phänomen von terroristischen Selbstmordattentaten untersucht: Diese scheinen ein spezifisch nicht-westliches Phänomen zu sein. Der deutliche Unterschied zwischen der Strategie westlicher Terrorgruppen und solchen Terrorgruppen, die Selbstmordattentate ausüben, geht auf ein besonderes Merkmal der Geschichte und der Eigenart des Westens zurück; und dies wiederum ist tief im Mittelalter verwurzelt. Against the bac…Read more
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610The metaphysics of real estateTopoi 20 (2): 161-172. 2001.The thesis that an analysis of property rights is essential to an adequate analysis of the state is a mainstay of political philosophy. The contours of the type of government a society has are shaped by the system regulating the property rights prevailing in that society. Views of this sort are widespread. They range from Locke to Nozick and encompass pretty much everything else in between. Defenders of this sort of view accord to property rights supreme importance. A state that does not suffici…Read more
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1249Questions: An essay in Daubertian phenomenologyPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 (3): 353-384. 1987.A number of logicians and philosophers have turned their attention in recent years to the problem of developing a logic of interrogatives. Their work has thrown a great deal of light on the formal properties of questions and question-sentences and has led also to interesting innovations in our understanding of the structures of performatives in general and, for example, in the theory of presuppositions. When, however, we examine the attempts of logicians such as Belnap or Åqvist to specify…Read more
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884Ontologies as Integrative Tools for Plant ScienceAmerican Journal of Botany 99 (8). 2012.Bio-ontologies are essential tools for accessing and analyzing the rapidly growing pool of plant genomic and phenomic data. Ontologies provide structured vocabularies to support consistent aggregation of data and a semantic framework for automated analyses and reasoning. They are a key component of the Semantic Web. This paper provides background on what bio-ontologies are, why they are relevant to botany, and the principles of ontology development. It includes an overview of ontologies and rela…Read more
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50Prolegomena to a Metaphysics of Real EstateIn Roberto Casati (ed.), Shadows and Socio-Economic Units. Foundations of Formal Geography, Technical University of Vienna. pp. 151--155. 1996.As an object in which property rights can be invested, land is a peculiar hybrid structure that comprehends both spatial and non-spatial aspects. Even in its purely spatial aspect land is treated differently from culture to culture, thus for example in the degree to which property rights in land are held to relate to vague or precisely delineated parcels and to portions of space above and below the surface of the earth. When we examine the non-spatial aspects of landed property, however, the dim…Read more
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314LinkSuite™: Software Tools for Formally Robust Ontology-Based Data and Information IntegrationIn Werner Ceusters, Barry Smith & James Matthew Fielding (eds.), Proceedings of DILS 2004 (Data Integration in the Life Sciences), (Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics, 2994), Springer. pp. 1-16. 2004.The integration of information resources in the life sciences is one of the most challenging problems facing bioinformatics today. We describe how Language and Computing nv, originally a developer of ontology-based natural language understanding systems for the healthcare domain, is developing a framework for the integration of structured data with unstructured information contained in natural language texts. L&C’s LinkSuite™ combines the flexibility of a modular software architecture with an on…Read more
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182Carving Up RealityIn Michael Gorman & Jonathan Sanford (eds.), Categories: Historical and Systematic Essays, Catholic University of America Press. pp. 225-237. 2004.If Mont Blanc is a vague object, then its vagueness will depend on the context in which reference is made. In a geological context the mountain might include only rock, perhaps together with a certain amount of air in the crevices and tunnels which have been formed beneath its surface. In a context of soil chemistry we might include also a surrounding thin layer of organic matter. In a skiing context we might include some snow. This essay sketches in informal terms the theory of granular partiti…Read more
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531Strategies for Referent Tracking in Electronic Health RecordsJournal of Biomedical Informatics 39 (3): 362-378. 2006.The goal of referent tracking is to create an ever-growing pool of data relating to the entities existing in concrete spatiotemporal reality. In the context of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) the relevant concrete entities are not only particular patients but also their parts, diseases, therapies, lesions, and so forth, insofar as these are salient to diagnosis and treatment. Within a referent tracking system, all such entities are referred to directly and explicitly, something which cannot…Read more
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705The cornucopia of formal-ontological relationsDialectica 58 (3). 2004.The paper presents a new method for generating typologies of formal-ontological relations. The guiding idea is that formal relations are those sorts of relations which hold between entities which are constituents of distinct ontologies. We provide examples of ontologies (in the spirit of Zemach’s classic “Four Ontologies” of 1970), and show how these can be used to give a rich typology of formal relations in a way which also throws light on the opposition between threeand four-dimensionalism.
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454Creating the ontologists of the futureApplied 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
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1075True gridIn Daniel R. Montello (ed.), Spatial Information Theory: Foundations of Geographic Information Science, Springer. pp. 14-27. 2001.The Renaissance architect, moral philosopher, cryptographer, mathematician, Papal adviser, painter, city planner and land surveyor Leon Battista Alberti provided the theoretical foundations of modern perspective geometry. Alberti’s work on perspective exerted a powerful influence on painters of the stature of Albrecht Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci and Piero della Francesca. But his Della pittura of 1435–36 contains also a hitherto unrecognized ontology of pictorial projection. We sketch this ontology…Read more
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501On 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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2045Function, role and disposition in Basic Formal OntologyProceedings of Bio-Ontologies Workshop, Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), Toronto. 2008.Numerous research groups are now utilizing Basic Formal Ontology as an upper-level framework to assist in the organization and integration of biomedical information. This paper provides elucidation of the three existing BFO subcategories of realizable entity, namely function, role, and disposition. It proposes one further sub-category of tendency, and considers the merits of recognizing two sub-categories of function for domain ontologies, namely, artifactual and biological function. The motivat…Read more
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451Biodynamic Ontology: Applying BFO in the Biomedical DomainStudies in Health and Technology Informatics 102. 2004.Current approaches to formal representation in biomedicine are characterized by their focus on either the static or the dynamic aspects of biological reality. We here outline a theory that combines both perspectives and at the same time tackles the by no means trivial issue of their coherent integration. Our position is that a good ontology must be capable of accounting for reality both synchronically (as it exists at a time) and diachronically (as it unfolds through time), but that these are tw…Read more
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437Living high and letting diePhilosophy 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
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522A science of topography: Bridging the qualitative-quantitative divideIn David M. Mark & Barry Smith (eds.), Geographic Information Science and Mountain Geomorphology, Chichester, England: Springer-praxis. pp. 75--100. 2004.The shape of the Earth's surface, its topography, is a fundamental dimension of the environment, shaping or mediating many other environmental flows or functions. But there is a major divergence in the way that topography is conceptualized in different domains. Topographic cartographers, information scientists, geomorphologists and environmental modelers typically conceptualize topographic variability as a continuous field of elevations or as some discrete approximation to such a field. Pilots, …Read more
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944Ingarden vs. Meinong on the logic of fictionPhilosophy 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
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1610Husserl’s Logical InvestigationsGrazer 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
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1090Parts 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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620Ontology for the Intelligence AnalystCrossTalk 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
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502Weininger und WittgensteinTeoria 2. 1984.The paper [which is in German] seeks to show how Weininger’s interpretations of Kant and Schopenhauer help us to understand some of the peculiar reflections on the will, on happiness and unhappiness, and on the problems of life, which are to be found in Wittgenstein's Notebooks. It seeks to explain, above all, why Wittgenstein should wish to reject the basic ethical axiom of “love thy neighbor.” There follows a sketch of one possible Kantian interpretation of the Tractatus along Weiningerian lin…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 |