Barry Smith

The last two decades have seen considerable efforts directed towards making Electronic Health Records interoperable through improve¬ments in medical ontologies, terminologies and coding systems. Unfortunately, these efforts have been hampered by a number of influential ideas inherited from the work of Eugen Wüster, the father of terminology standardization and the founder of ISO TC 37. We here survey Wüster’s ideas – which see terminology work as being focused on the classification of concepts in people’s minds – and we argue that they serve still as the basis for a series of influential confusions. We argue further that an ontology based unambiguously, not on concepts, but on the classification of entities in reality can, by removing these confusions, make a vital contribution to ensuring the interoperability of coding systems and healthcare records in the future.

Vor genau zwei Jahren habe ich auf der damaligen Bonner Heidegger-Gedächtnis-Tagung der Humboldt-Stiftung einen Vortrag “Über die Nichtübersetzbarkeit der deutschen Philosophie” gehalten, dessen Inhalt sich mit meinem heutigen Vortrag vielfach überschneidet. Meine These war damals die, daß gewisse Formen des philosophischen Schreibens und Sprechens dadurch bestimmt sind, daß sie zu Ergebnissen führen, die eine Ähnlichkeit mit gewissen poetischen und religiösen Texten aufweisen, in dem Sinn, daß sie absichtlich den Rahmen des bisher bestehenden Sprachgebrauchs sprengen. Ursprünglich vor allem bei deutschen und neuerdings in einem noch erheblicheren Maß bei gewissen französischen Philosophen sind derartige Absichten nachweisbar. Bei englischsprachigen Philosophen dagegen spielen sie gar keine Rolle, es sei denn, daß diese Philosophen zu Gruppierungen gehören, die sich durch die deutsche oder französische Philosophie inspirieren lassen.

The essay is divided into four main parts: the first sketches basic dichotomy of substances (objects, things, persons), on the one hand, and accidents (events, qualities, actions) at the heart of Aristotelian ontology. The second outlines some of the subtypes falling under these two headings. The third concerns the Aristotelian ontology of what is extended in space, including in particular a sketch of Aristotle’s theory of places. The fourth and final part then goes beyond Aristotle to give an account of the ontology of the environments which constitute the everyday world of human action.

We assume 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 question with either a 'yes' or a 'no'. 'No' is the preferred answer of most contemporary methodologists – Murray Rothbard is one distinguished counterexample to this trend – who maintain that empirical theories are completely free of non-empirical ('a priori') admixtures and who see science as a matter of the gathering of pure 'data' obtained through simple observation. From such data scientific propositions are then supposed to be somehow capable of being established.

You might think that Kraus's single-minded devotion to the task of draining the swamp of journalistic phrasemaking was somewhat exaggerated. Surely journalism cannot be so bad or so important that one should devote 40 years of one's life to attacking it. Kraus was not, however, interested in individual acts of misusing language on the part of individual journalists. Rather, he took examples of the misuse of language as illustrative phenomena, as exemplars. He was concerned to root out a certain metaphysical duplicity, a lack of fit between language and thought, whereby Kraus himself would serve as judge, trying Viennese journalism under the law that is the grammar of the German language itself. Hitler caused Kraus to go linguistically mad. The issue of _Die Fackel_ that appeared after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany is unintelligible. It consists of a 300-page essay on "Why _Die Fackel_ does not appear."

There is a frequently recurring clinical phenomenon, familiar to those who work with adolescents, which is sometimes called "Pascal's syndrome." The syndrome affects a significant fraction of adolescents who, in striving to establish themselves as fully independent, adult selves, pass through a phase in which they make utterances such as "Reality does not exist,'' "The world is a gigantic conspiracy directed against me personally,'' "Only I have a clear understanding of what the world is like; all others (and especially my parents, teachers, politicians, etc.) are deluded," and so forth. Pascal's syndrme is, fortunately, a transient affliction; it is a mercifully short-lived phase in the lives of the vast majority of affected individuals. There are, however, some -- including some philosophers -- who never grow out of it.

Často sa poukazuje na to, že rakúska ekonomická škola je vystavaná na základe, ktorý by sme mohli najvhodnejšie nazvať ako aristotelovská metodológia. Teda rakúski ekonómovia si typicky osvojujú realistickú perspektívu, tvrdiac, že svet jestvuje nezávisle od nášho (t.j. ľudského) myslenia a našej argumentácie. Ďalej tvrdia, že svet obsahuje isté jednoduché esencie alebo povahové vlastnosti, ktoré je možné nahliadnuť ako zákonitosti vytvárajúce komplexnejšie statické či dynamické celky. Ďalej tvrdia, že tieto esencie alebo esenciálne štruktúry sú pochopiteľné, v tom zmysle, že vedec ich môže neinduktívne uchopiť pomocou teórie, veľmi podobne tomu ako uchopujeme rozdiel medzi červenou a zelenou farbou, kružnicou a štvorcom, výstražným posunkom a pochvalou, a podobne.

This paper reports the results of a series of experiments designed to establish how non-expert subjects conceptualize geospatial phenomena. Subjects were asked to give examples of geographical categories in response to a series of differently phrased elicitations. The results yield an ontology of geographical categories—a catalogue of the prime geospatial concepts and categories shared in common by human subjects independently of their exposure to scientific geography. When combined with nouns such as feature and object, the adjective geographic elicited almost exclusively elements of the physical environment of geographical scale or size, such as mountain, lake and river. The phrase things that could be portrayed on a map, on the other hand, produced many geographical scale artefacts (roads, cities, etc.) and fiat objects (states, countries, etc.), as well as some physical feature types. These data reveal considerable mismatch as between the meanings assigned to the terms ‘geography’ and ‘geographic’ by scientific geographers and by ordinary subjects, so that scientific geographers are not in fact studying geographical phenomena as such phenomena are conceptualized by naive subjects. The data suggest, rather, a special role in determining the subject-matter of scientific geography for the concept of what can be portrayed on a map. This work has implications for work on usability and interoperability in geographical information science, and it throws light also on subtle and hitherto unexplored ways in which ontological terms such as ‘object’, ‘entity’ and ‘feature’ interact with geographical concepts.

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 pertaining to guilt and responsibility – which hover uncomfortably close to the boundary between the observer-relative and the observer-independent. By means of a thought experiment involving an imagined Chinese society in which guilt is determined by the random throwing of sticks, I seek to show that moral concepts threaten the foundations of Searle’s philosophy of social reality.