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1667Towards a History of Speech Act TheoryIn Armin Burkhardt (ed.), Speech acts, meaning, and intentions: critical approaches to the philosophy of John R. Searle, W. De Gruyter. pp. 29--61. 1990.That uses of language not only can, but even normally do, have the character of actions was a fact largely unrealised by those engaged in the study of language before the present century, at least in the sense that there was lacking any attempt to come to terms systematically with the action-theoretic peculiarities of language use. Where the action-character of linguistic phenomena was acknowledged, it was normally regarded as a peripheral matter, relating to derivative or nonstandard aspects of…Read more
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1659Do mountains exist? Towards an ontology of landformsEnvironment 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.
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1639Aristotle, Menger, Mises: An essay in the metaphysics of economicsHistory of Political Economy, Annual Supplement 22 263-288. 1990.There are, familiarly, a range of distinct and competing accounts of the methodological underpinnings of Menger' s work. These include Leibnizian, Kantian, Millian, and even Popperian readings; but they include also readings of an Aristotelian sort, and I have myself made a number of contributions in clarification and defence of the latter. Not only, I have argued, does the historical situation in which Menger found himself point to the inevitability of the Aristotelian reading; this reading …Read more
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1596The Space Object OntologyIn Alexander P. Cox, Christopher Nebelecky, Ronald Rudnicki, William Tagliaferri, John L. Crassidis & Barry Smith (eds.), 19th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION 2016), Ieee. 2016.Achieving space domain awareness requires the identification, characterization, and tracking of space objects. Storing and leveraging associated space object data for purposes such as hostile threat assessment, object identification, and collision prediction and avoidance present further challenges. Space objects are characterized according to a variety of parameters including their identifiers, design specifications, components, subsystems, capabilities, vulnerabilities, origins, missio…Read more
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1588Kafka and Brentano: A Study in Descriptive PsychologyIn Structure and Gestalt: Philosophy and Literature in Austria-Hungary and Her Successor States, John Benjamins. pp. 113-144. 1981.There is a narrow thread in the vast literature on Kafka which pertains to Kafka’s knowledge of philosophy, and more precisely to Kafka’s use in his fictional writings of some of the main ideas of Franz Brentano. Kafka attended courses in philosophy at the Charles University given by Brentano’s students Anton Marty and Christian von Ehrenfels, and was for several years a member of a discussion-group organized by orthodox adherents of the Brentanian philosophy in Prague. The present essay summari…Read more
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1583Husserl’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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1536Truth-MakersPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 44 (3): 287-321. 1984.A realist theory of truth for a class of sentences 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 core of our theory is the account of truthmaki…Read more
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1503The evaluation of ontologies: Toward improved semantic interoperabilityIn Chris Baker & Kei H. Cheung (eds.), Semantic Web: Revolutionizing Knowledge Discovery in the Life Sciences, Springer. pp. 139-158. 2006.Recent years have seen rapid progress in the development of ontologies as semantic models intended to capture and represent aspects of the real world. There is, however, great variation in the quality of ontologies. If ontologies are to become progressively better in the future, more rigorously developed, and more appropriately compared, then a systematic discipline of ontology evaluation must be created to ensure quality of content and methodology. Systematic methods for ontology evaluation wil…Read more
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1345Practical Knowledge: Outlines of a Theory of Traditions and Skills (edited book)Croom Helm. 1988.A series of papers on different aspects of practical knowledge by Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Haller, J. C. Nyiri, Eva Picardi, Joachim Schulte Roger Scruton, Barry Smith and Johan Wrede.
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1336The majority of the papers in the present volume were presented at, or prepared in conjunction with, meetings of the Seminar for Austro-German Philosophy, a group of philosophers interested in the work of Brentano and Husserl and of the...
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1297Ontology: Towards a new synthesisIn Formal Ontology in Information Systems, Acm Press. 2001.This introduction to the second international conference on Formal Ontology and Information Systems presents a brief history of ontology as a discipline spanning the boundaries of philosophy and information science. We sketch some of the reasons for the growth of ontology in the information science field, and offer a preliminary stocktaking of how the term ‘ontology’ is currently used. We conclude by suggesting some grounds for optimism as concerns the future collaboration between philosophical …Read more
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1292Ontology-based fusion of sensor data and natural languageApplied ontology 13 (4): 295-333. 2018.We describe a prototype ontology-driven information system (ODIS) that exploits what we call Portion of Reality (POR) representations. The system takes both sensor data and natural language text as inputs and composes on this basis logically structured POR assertions. The goal of our prototype is to represent both natural language and sensor data within a single framework that is able to support both axiomatic reasoning and computation. In addition, the framework should be capable of discovering…Read more
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1291Materials towards a history of speech act theoryIn Aschim Eschbach (ed.), Karl Bühler's Theory of Language: Proceedings of the Conference held at Kirchberg and Essen, John Benjamin. pp. 125-152. 1988.Preliminary version of “Towards a History of Speech Act Theory”, in A. Burkhardt (ed.), Speech Acts, Meanings and Intentions. Critical Approaches to the Philosophy of John R. Searle, Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1990, 29–61.
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1287Framework 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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1266Towards an Ontological Representation of Resistance: The Case of MRSAJournal of Biomedical Informatics 44 (1): 35-41. 2011.This paper addresses a family of issues surrounding the biological phenomenon of resistance and its representation in realist ontologies. The treatments of resistance terms in various existing ontologies are examined and found to be either overly narrow, internally inconsistent, or otherwise problematic. We propose a more coherent characterization of resistance in terms of what we shall call blocking dispositions, which are collections of mutually coordinated dispositions which are of such a sor…Read more
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1255Austrian Economics and Austrian PhilosophyIn Smith W. Grassl and B. (ed.), Austrian Economics and Austrian Philosophy, Helm Croom. pp. 1-36. 1986.Austrian economics starts out from the thesis that the objects of economic science differ from those of the natural sciences because of the centrality of the economic agent. This allows a certain a priori or essentialistic aspect to economic science of a sort which parallels the a priori dimension of psychology defended by Brentano and his student Edmund Husserl. We outline these parallels, and show how the theory of a priori dependence relations outlined in Husserl’s Logical Investigations can …Read more
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1240Formal ontology, common sense, and cognitive scienceInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies 43 (5-6). 1995.Common sense is on the one hand a certain set of processes of natural cognition - of speaking, reasoning, seeing, and so on. On the other hand common sense is a system of beliefs (of folk physics, folk psychology and so on). Over against both of these is the world of common sense, the world of objects to which the processes of natural cognition and the corresponding belief-contents standardly relate. What are the structures of this world? How does the scientific treatment of this world relate to…Read more
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1236Functions in Basic Formal OntologyApplied ontology 11 (2): 103-128. 2016.The notion of function is indispensable to our understanding of distinctions such as that between being broken and being in working order (for artifacts) and between being diseased and being healthy (for organisms). A clear account of the ontology of functions and functioning is thus an important desideratum for any top-level ontology intended for application to domains such as engineering or medicine. The benefit of using top-level ontologies in applied ontology can only be realized when each o…Read more
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1233Questions: 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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1232When the U.S. conducts warfare, elements of a force are drawn from different services and work together as a single team to accomplish an assigned mission. To achieve such unified action, it is necessary that the doctrines governing the actions of members of specific services be both consistent with and subservient to joint Doctrine. Because warfighting today increasingly involves not only live forces but also automated systems, unified action requires that information technology that is used in…Read more
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1223Husserl’s Theory of Meaning and ReferenceIn L. Haaparanta (ed.), Mind, Meaning and Mathematics: Essays on the Philosophy of Husserl and Frege, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 163-183. 1994.This paper is a contribution to the historical roots of the analytical tradition. As Michael Dummett points out in his Origins of Analytic Philosophy, many tendencies in Central European thought contributed to the early development of analytic philosophy. Dummett himself concentrates on just one aspect of this historical complex, namely on the relationship between the theories of meaning and reference developed by Frege and by Husserl in the years around the turn of the century. It is to this sp…Read more
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1211The Emotion Ontology: Enabling Interdisciplinary Research in the Affective SciencesIn M. Beigl, H. Christiansen, T. Roth-Berghofer, A. Kofod-Petersen, K. R. Coventry & H. R. Schmidtke (eds.), CONTEXT, The Seventh International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context, Springer. pp. 119--123. 2011.Affective science conducts interdisciplinary research into the emotions and other affective phenomena. Currently, such research is hampered by the lack of common definitions of terms used to describe, categorise and report both individual emotional experiences and the results of scientific investigations of such experiences. High quality ontologies provide formal definitions for types of entities in reality and for the relationships between such entities, definitions which can be used to disambi…Read more
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1204The birth of ontologyJournal of Knowledge Structures and Systems 3 (1): 57-66. 2022.This review focuses on the Ogdoas scholastica by Jacob Lorhard, published in 1606. The importance of this document turns on the fact that it contains what is almost certainly the first published occurrence of the term “ontology.” The body of the work consists in a series of diagrams called “diagraphs.” Relevant features of this compendium of diagraphs are: 1. that it does not in fact contain the word “ontology,” and 2. that Lorhard himself was not responsible for its content.
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1188Austrian 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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1187Towards an ontology of painIn Proceedings of the Conference on Ontology and Analytical Metaphysics, Keio University Press. 2011.We present an ontology of pain and of other pain-related phenomena, building on the definition of pain provided by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP). Our strategy is to identify an evolutionarily basic canonical pain phenomenon, involving unpleasant sensory and emotional experience based causally in localized tissue damage that is concordant with that experience. We then show how different variant cases of this canonical pain phenomenon can be distinguished, including pa…Read more
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1177On substances, accidents and universals: In defence of a constituent ontologyPhilosophical Papers 26 (1): 105-127. 1997.The essay constructs an ontological theory designed to capture the categories instantiated in those portions or levels of reality which are captured in our common sense conceptual scheme. It takes as its starting point an Aristotelian ontology of “substances” and “accidents”, which are treated via the instruments of mereology and topology. The theory recognizes not only individual parts of substances and accidents, including the internal and external boundaries of these, but also universal parts…Read more
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1155Real Estate: Foundations of the Ontology of PropertyIn 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
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1146Interoperability of disparate engineering domain ontologies using Basic Formal OntologyJournal of Engineering Design 31. 2019.As engineering applications require management of ever larger volumes of data, ontologies offer the potential to capture, manage, and augment data with the capability for automated reasoning and semantic querying. Unfortunately, considerable barriers hinder wider deployment of ontologies in engineering. Key among these is lack of a shared top-level ontology to unify and organise disparate aspects of the field and coordinate co-development of orthogonal ontologies. As a result, many engineering o…Read more
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1130Development of a Manufacturing Ontology for Functionally Graded MaterialsIn Francesco Furini, Rahul Rai, Barry Smith, Georgio Colombo & Venkat Krovi (eds.), Proceedings of International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE), . 2016.The development of manufacturing technologies for new materials involves the generation of a large and continually evolving volume of information. The analysis, integration and management of such large volumes of data, typically stored in multiple independently developed databases, creates significant challenges for practitioners. There is a critical need especially for open-sharing of data pertaining to engineering design which together with effective decision support tools can enable innovatio…Read more
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1112We describe a strategy for integration of data that is based on the idea of semantic enhancement. The strategy promises a number of benefits: it can be applied incrementally; it creates minimal barriers to the incorporation of new data into the semantically enhanced system; it preserves the existing data (including any existing data-semantics) in their original form (thus all provenance information is retained, and no heavy preprocessing is required); and it embraces the full spectrum of data so…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 |