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64Skepticism, Morality and the MatrixIn W. Irwin (ed.), Philosophy and The Matrix, Open Court. pp. 16-27. 2002.The Matrix exposes us to the uncomfortable worries of philosophical skepticism in an especially compelling way. However, with a bit more reflection, we can see why we need not share the skeptic’s doubts about the existence of the world. Such doubts are appropriate only in the very special context of the philosophical seminar. When we return to normal life we see immediately that they are groundless. Furthermore, we see also the drastic mistake that Cypher commits in turning his back upon reality…Read more
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198What I know when I know a languageIn Ernie Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. 2005.EVERY speaker of a language knows a bewildering variety of linguistic facts, and will come to know many more. It is knowledge that connects sound and meaning. Questions about the nature of this knowledge cannot be separated from fundamental questions about the nature of language. The conception of language we should adopt depends on the part it plays in explaining our knowledge of language. This chapter explores options in accounting for language, and our knowledge of language, and defends the v…Read more
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2What we mean, what we think we mean, and how language surprises usIn E. Romero & B. Soria (eds.), Explicit Communication: Robyn Carston's Pragmatics, Palgrave Macmillan. 2007.In uttering a sentence we are often taken to assert more than its literal meaning — though we sometimes assert less. Robyn Carston and others take this phenomenon to show that what is said or asserted by a speaker on an occasion of utterance is usually a contextuallyenriched version of the semantic content of the sentence. I shall argue that we can resist this conclusion if we recognize that what we think we are asserting, or take others to be asserting, involves selective attention to one of th…Read more
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2OntologyIn Luciano Floridi (ed.), The Blackwell guide to the philosophy of computing and information, Blackwell. pp. 155-166. 2003.Ontology as a branch of philosophy is the science of what is, of the kinds and structures of objects, properties, events, processes and relations in every area of reality. ‘Ontology’ is often used by philosophers as a synonym of ‘metaphysics’ (a label meaning literally: ‘what comes after the Physics’), a term used by early students of Aristotle to refer to what Aristotle himself called ‘first philosophy’. Sometimes ‘ontology’ is used in a broader sense, to refer to the study of what might exist;…Read more
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1L’ontologia del senso communeIn Evandro Agazzi (ed.), Valore e limiti del senso comune, F. Angeli. 2004.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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25OntologyIn Luciano Floridi (ed.), The Blackwell guide to the philosophy of computing and information, Blackwell. pp. 153-166. 2003.Ontology as a branch of philosophy is the science of what is, of the kinds and structures of objects, properties, events, processes and relations in every area of reality. ‘Ontology’ in this sense is often used by philosophers as a synonym of ‘metaphysics’ (a label meaning literally: ‘what comes after the Physics’), a term used by early students of Aristotle to refer to what Aristotle himself called ‘first philosophy’. But in recent years, in a development hardly noticed by philosophers, the ter…Read more
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4OntologyIn Luciano Floridi (ed.), The Blackwell guide to the philosophy of computing and information, Blackwell. pp. 153-166. 2003.Ontology as a branch of philosophy is the science of what is, of the kinds and structures of objects, properties, events, processes and relations in every area of reality. ‘Ontology’ in this sense is a term often used by philosophers as a synonym of ‘metaphysics’ (a label meaning literally: ‘what comes after the Physics’), a term used by early students of Aristotle to refer to what Aristotle himself called ‘first philosophy’. But in recent years, in a development hardly noticed by philosophers, …Read more
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3Book Reviews (review)History and Philosophy of Logic 12 (2): 241-267. 1991.MEDIEVAL LOGICCARLOS A. DUFOUR, Die Lehre der Proprietates Terminorum. Sinn und Referenz in mittelalterlicher Logik. München, Hamden, Wien: Philosophia, 1989. 312 pp. 148 DM.NORMAN KRETZMANN and BARBARA ENSIGN KRETZMANN The Sophismata of Richard Kilvington. Oxford: Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 1990. xx + 156 pp. £27.50.LOGIC AND MATHEMATICSSOULEYMANE BACHIR DIAGNE, Boole. Paris: Editions Belin, 1989. 262pp. 75 Ffr.M.-M. TOEPELL, Über die Entstehung von David Hilb…Read more
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What I know wheniknow alanguageIn Ernie Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. pp. 941. 2005.
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8 Common senseIn Barry Smith & David Woodruff Smith (eds.), The Cambridge companion to Husserl, Cambridge University Press. pp. 394. 1995.
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Prolegomena 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.
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1Book Reviews (review)History and Philosophy of Logic 17 (1-2): 155-177. 1996.Gennaro Chtjerchia, Dynamics of meaning: anaphora, presupposition, and the the of grammar. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.xv+ 270 pp, £59.95, £31.95 G. Pr...
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3Individuals, Universals, Collections: On the Foundational Relations of OntologyIn Thomas Bittner, Maureen Donnelly & Barry Smith (eds.), Individuals, universals, collections: On the foundational relations of ontology, Ios Press. 2004.This paper provides an axiomatic formalization of a theory of foundational relations between three categories of entities: individuals, universals, and collections. We deal with a variety of relations between entities in these categories, including the is-a relation among universals and the part-of relation among individuals as well as cross-category relations such as instance-of, member-of, and partition-of. We show that an adequate understanding of the formal properties of such relations – in …Read more
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Topological foundations of cognitive scienceIn Topological foundations of cognitive science, Graduiertenkolleg Kognitionswissenschaft. pp. 3--22. 1994.
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On Knowing One's Own Language 1In C. Macdonald, Barry C. Smith & C. J. G. Wright (eds.), Knowing Our Own Minds: Essays in Self-Knowledge, Oxford University Press. 1998.The problem of self‐knowledge is examined and the linguistic strategy for tackling it is explored. The strategy attempts—as in Davidson's and Wright's discussions of self‐knowledge—to ground knowledge of one's mind on knowledge of what one means in speaking one's mind. If knowing what one is saying in speaking a language is to provide a means of knowing one's own mind, it cannot simply be a part of it. But if no account of knowledge of what one means is offered, there will be a lacuna in the str…Read more
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4Book Reviews (review)History and Philosophy of Logic 9 (1): 107-129. 1988.MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE LOGICSMARK D. JOHNSTON, The spiritual logic of Ramon Llull. Oxford: Clarendon Press,1987. xi + 336 pp. £35.00E. J. ASHWORTH, Thomas Bricot: Tractatus Znsolubilium. Nijmegen: Ingenium, 1986. xxiii+ 155 pp. 44 Dfl.CYPRIANI REGNERI, Demonstratio logicae verae iuridica. Edited by G. Kalinowski. Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice Bologna, 1986. xxviii + 167 pp. No price stated.GIROLAMO SACCHERI, Euclides vindicatus. Edited and translated by George Bruce Hals…Read more
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IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (IEEE BIBM 2015), (edited book). 2015.
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Proceedings of DILS 2004 (Data Integration in the Life Sciences), (Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics 2994) (edited book)Springer. 2004.