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176Signs and MeaningsIn Peer Bundgaard & Frederik Stjernfelt (eds.), Signs and Meanings: Five Questions, Automatic Press. pp. 199--206. 2009.A background piece on the role of ontology in technology research, focusing especially on the use-mention confusion.
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460Ontology and the logistic analysis of realityIn Nicola Guarino & Roberto Poli (eds.), Proceedings of the International Workshop on Formal Ontology in Conceptual Analysis and Knowledge Representation, Italian National Research Council. pp. 51-68. 1993.I shall attempt in what follows to show how mereology, taken together with certain topological notions, can yield the basis for future investigations in formal ontology. I shall attempt to show also how the mereological framework here advanced can allow the direct and natural formulation of a series of theses – for example pertaining to the concept of boundary – which can be formulated only indirectly (if at all) in set-theoretic terms.
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511Normalizing medical ontologies using Basic Formal OntologyIn K. Versorgung & V. Forschung (eds.), Ubiquitäre Information (Proceedings of GMDS 2004), Videel Ohg. pp. 199-201. 2004.Description Logics are nowadays widely accepted as formalisms which provide reasoning facilities which allow us to discover inconsistencies in ontologies in an automatic fashion. Where ontologies are developed in modular fashion, they allow changes in one module to propogated through the system of ontologies automatically in a way which helps to maintain consistency and stability. For this feature to be utilized effectively, however, requires that domain ontologies be represented in a normalized…Read more
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770Applied ontology: A new discipline is bornPhilosophy Today 12 (29): 5-6. 1998.The discipline of applied ethics already has a certain familiarity in the Anglo-Saxon world, above all through the work of Peter Singer. Applied ethics uses the tools of moral philosophy to resolve practical problems of the sort which arise, for example, in the running of hospitals. In the University at Buffalo (New York) there was organized on April 24-25 1998 the world's first conference on a new, sister discipline, the discipline of applied ontology. Applied ontologists seek to apply ontolog…Read more
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383Values in Contexts: An Ontological TheoryIn G. John M. Abbarno (ed.), Inherent and Instrumental Values: Excursions in Value Inquiry, University Press of America. pp. 17-29. 2014.Values exist not in isolation, but in complex wholes. Values are what they are because of the complex wholes in which they are situated. To do justice to this thesis will require a holistic ontology, a theory according to which many types of entities exist only as inseparable parts or moments of wider contexts or environments. An ontological theory of environments -- with roots in Gestalt psychology and the ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson and Roger Barker, and which is related also to the …Read more
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5631Gestalt theory: An essay in philosophyIn Foundations of Gestalt Theory, Philosophia Verlag. pp. 11-81. 1988.The Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels published his essay "On 'Gestalt Qualities'" in 1890. The essay initiated a current of thought which enjoyed a powerful position in the philosophy and psychology of the first half of this century and has more recently enjoyed a minor resurgence of interest in the area of cognitive science, above all in criticisms of the so-called 'strong programme' in artificial intelligence. The theory of Gestalt is of course associated most…Read more
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589Ontology and Geographic KindsIn T. Poiker & N. Chrisman (eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling, International Geographic Union. pp. 308-320. 1998.Cognitive categories in the geographic realm appear to manifest certain special features as contrasted with categories for objects at surveyable scales. We have argued that these features reflect specific ontological characteristics of geographic objects. This paper presents hypotheses as to the nature of the features mentioned, reviews previous empirical work on geographic categories, and presents the results of pilot experiments that used English-speaking subjects to test our hypotheses. Our e…Read more
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360Functional anatomy: A taxonomic proposalActa Biotheoretica 53 (3): 153-166. 2005.It is argued that medical science requires a classificatory system that (a) puts functions in the taxonomic center and (b) does justice ontologically to the difference between the processes which are the realizations of functions and the objects which are their bearers. We propose formulae for constructing such a system and describe some of its benefits. The arguments are general enough to be of interest to all the life sciences.
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204Logica KirchbergensisIn Peter Klein (ed.), Praktische Logik. Traditionen und Tendenzen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. pp. 123-145. 1989.In der klassischen Logik von Aristoteles bis Wolff findet sich eine durchgängige Parallelität von logischen (einschließlich grammatikalischen und psychologischen) und ontologischen Gebilden. Der Logiker beschäftigt sich mit Subjekt und Prädikat, aber gleichzeitig auch z.B. mit Substanz und Akzidenz als Entitäten in der Welt. Nach Kant begann für die Logik eine Phase, in der diese ontologische oder objektbezogene Seite verloren ging. Gegen Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts beginnt man dann aber wieder üb…Read more
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218Groups, sets, and wholesRivista di Estetica 43 (24): 126-127. 2003.As he recalls in his book Naive Physics, Paolo Bozzi’s experiments on naïve or phenomenological physics were partly inspired by Aristotle’s spokesman Simplicio in Galileo’s Dialogue. Aristotle’s ‘naïve’ views of physical reality reflect the ways in which we are disposed perceptually to organize the physical reality we see. In what follows I want to apply this idea to the notion of a group, a term which I shall apply as an umbrella expression embracing ordinary visible collections (of pieces of f…Read more
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208Aristoteles 2002In T. Buchheim (ed.), Kann man heute noch etwas anfangen mit Aristoteles?, Meiner. pp. 3-38. 2003.The essay surveys recent developments in ontology and defends a strategy for improvement of ontologies based on ontological realism. As a thought experiment, we consider central theses of Aristotelian metaphysics, and show how they fall short of what we believe to be the requirements of ontology today. Above all, Aristotle provides us with no strategy for the reconciliation of common-sense realism and scientific realism where these diverge. We focus specifically on shortfalls in Aristotle’s trea…Read more
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461Truthmaker realismAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 77 (3). 1999.We take as our starting point a thesis to the effect that, at least for true judgments of many varieties, there are parts of reality which make such judgments are true. We argue that two distinct components are involved in this truthmaker relation. On the one hand is the relation of necessitation, which holds between an object x and a judgment p when the existence of x entails the truth of p. On the other hand is the dual notion of projection, which holds between a judgment p and an objec…Read more
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377Roman Ingarden: Ontological Foundations for Literary TheoryIn John Odmark (ed.), Language, Literature and Meaning I: Problems of Literary Theory, Benjamins. pp. 373-390. 1979.The paper seeks to apply the work of the Polish phenomenologist Roman Ingarden to certain problems in literary theory; contrasts the notions of ontological and epistemological incompleteness of the represented objects of a literary work and considers the question of the nature of such objects. The paper concludes by analyzing some of the degrees of freedom possessed by the readings of literary work in relation to the work itself.
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435Elements of Speech Act Theory in the Work of Thomas ReidHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 7 (1). 1990.Historical research has recently made it clear that, prior to Austin and Searle, the phenomenologist Adolf Reinach (1884-1917) developed a full-fledged theory of speech acts under the heading of what he called "social acts". He we consider a second instance of a speech act theory avant la lettre, which is to be found in the common sense philosophy of Thomas Reid (1710-1796). Reid’s s work, in contrast to that of Reinach, lacks both a unified approach and the detailed analyses of pertinent exampl…Read more
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337This paper addresses the use of dispositions in the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO). IDO is an ontology constructed according to the principles of the Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry and uses the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as an upper ontology. After providing a brief introduction to disposition types in BFO and IDO, we discuss three general techniques for representing combinations of dispositions under the headings blocking dispositions, complementary dispositions, and collective disp…Read more
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949Foundations of an ontology of philosophySynthese 182 (2): 185-204. 2011.We describe an ontology of philosophy that is designed to aid navigation through philosophical literature, including literature in the form of encyclopedia articles and textbooks and in both printed and digital forms. The ontology is designed also to serve integration and structuring of data pertaining to the philosophical literature, and in the long term also to support reasoning about the provenance and contents of such literature, by providing a representation of the philosophical domain that…Read more
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367Kasimir Twardowski: An Essay on the Borderlines of Psychology, Ontology and LogicIn K. Szaniawski (ed.), The Vienna Circle and the Philosophy of the Lvov-Warsaw School, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 313--375. 1988.The influence of Kasimir Twardowski on modern Polish philosophy is all-pervasive. As is well known, almost all important 20th century Polish philosophers went through the hard training of his courses in Lvov. Twardowski instilled in his students an enduring concern for clarity and rigour. He taught them to regard philosophy as a collaborative effort, a matter of disciplined discussion and argument. And he encouraged them to work together with scientists from other disciplines — above all with ps…Read more
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1046Franz Brentano on the Ontology of MindPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 45 (4): 627-644. 1985.This is a review article on Franz Brentano’s Descriptive Psychology published in 1982. We provide a detailed exposition of Brentano’s work on this topic, focusing on the unity of consciousness, the modes of connection and the types of part, including separable parts, distinctive parts, logical parts and what Brentano calls modificational quasi-parts. We also deal with Brentano’s account of the objects of sensation and the experience of time.
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221How to Distinguish Parthood from Location in BioontologiesIn Stefan Schulz, Philipp Daumke, Barry Smith & Udo Hahn (eds.), Proceedings of the AMIA Symposium, American Medical Informatics Association. pp. 669-673. 2005.The pivotal role of the relation part-of in the description of living organisms is widely acknowledged. Organisms are open systems, which means that in contradistinction to mechanical artifacts they are characterized by a continuous flow and exchange of matter. A closer analysis of the spatial relations in biological organisms reveals that the decision as to whether a given particular is part-of a second particular or whether it is only contained-in the second particular is often controversial. …Read more
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680Towards Industrial Strength Philosophy: How Analytical Ontology Can Help Medical InformaticsInterdisciplinary Science Reviews 28 (2). 2003.Initially the problems of data integration, for example in the field of medicine, were resolved in case by case fashion. Pairs of databases were cross-calibrated by hand, rather as if one were translating from French into Hebrew. As the numbers and complexity of database systems increased, the idea arose of streamlining these efforts by constructing one single benchmark taxonomy, as it were a central switchboard, into which all of the various classification systems would need to be translated on…Read more
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577Philosophie, Politik und Wissenschaftliche WeltauffassungGrazer Philosophische Studien 58 (1): 1-22. 2000.Die Entwicklung der Philosophie in Österreich unterscheidet sich in markanter Weise von der Hauptlinie der philosophischen Entwicklung in Deutschland. Dabei fällt bei der österreichischen Philosophie vor allem die konsequente Orientierung an den Wissenschaften auf. In der philosophiegeschichtlichen Forschung sind für diese Besonderheit der österreichischen Philosophie z. B. von Otto Neurath, Rudolf Haller, Friedrich Stadier und J.C. Nyiri verschiedene Erklärungen vorgeschlagen worden. In diesen …Read more
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799Promoting coherent minimum reporting guidelines for biological and biomedical investigations: the MIBBI projectNature Biotechnology 26 (8): 889-896. 2008.Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental c…Read more
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1112Characteristica UniversalisIn Kevin Mulligan (ed.), Language, Truth and Ontology, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 48--77. 1992.Recent work in formal philosophy has concentrated over-whelmingly on the logical problems pertaining to epistemic shortfall - which is to say on the various ways in which partial and sometimes incorrect information may be stored and processed. A directly depicting language, in contrast, would reflect a condition of epistemic perfection. It would enable us to construct representations not of our knowledge but of the structures of reality itself, in much the way that chemical diagrams allow the re…Read more
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212A Unified Framework for Biomedical Terminologies and OntologiesStudies in Health Technology and Informatics 160 1050-1054. 2010.The goal of the OBO (Open Biomedical Ontologies) Foundry initiative is to create and maintain an evolving collection of non-overlapping interoperable ontologies that will offer unambiguous representations of the types of entities in biological and biomedical reality. These ontologies are designed to serve non-redundant annotation of data and scientific text. To achieve these ends, the Foundry imposes strict requirements upon the ontologies eligible for inclusion. While these requirements are not…Read more
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285Referent Tracking: The Problem of Negative FindingsStudies in Health Technology and Informatics 124 741-46. 2006.The paradigm of referent tracking is based on a realist presupposition which rejects so-called negative entities (congenital absent nipple, and the like) as spurious. How, then, can a referent tracking-based Electronic Health Record deal with what are standardly called ‘negative findings’? To answer this question we carried out an analysis of some 748 sentences drawn from patient charts and containing some form of negation. Our analysis shows that to deal with these sentences we need to introduc…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 |