-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
A science of topography: From qualitative ontology to digital representationsIn David M. Mark & Barry Smith (eds.), Geographic Information Science and Mountain Geomorphology, Chichester, England: Springer-praxis. pp. 75--100. 2004.
-
On Place and Space: The Ontology of the EruvIn Christian Kanzian (ed.), Cultures. Conflict - Analysis - Dialogue: Proceedings of the 29th International Ludwig Wittgenstein-Symposium in Kirchberg, Austria, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 403-416. 2007.
-
The chemical sensesIn Mohan Matthen (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception, Oxford University Press Uk. 2015.
-
The Theory of Value of Christian von EhrenfelsIn Reinhard Fabian (ed.), Christian von Ehrenfels: Leben und Werk, Rodopi. pp. 150--171. 1986.Christian von Ehrenfels was a student of both Franz Brentano and Carl Menger and his thinking on value theory was inspired both by Brentano’s descriptive psychology and by the subjective theory of economic value advanced by Menger, the founder of the Austrian school of economics. Value, for Ehrenfels, is a function of desire, and we ascribe value to those things which we either do in fact desire, or would desire if we were not convinced of their existence. He asserts that the needed theoretical …Read more
-
Referent Tracking Portions of RealityIn Werner Ceusters, Shahid Manzoor & Barry Smith (eds.), Referent Tracking of Portions of Reality. Docket No. 1097.015A (USPA 2009055437), Us Patent Office. 2008.
-
54Ontologies for the life sciencesIn Schulze-Kremer Steffen & Smith Barry (eds.), Encyclopedia of Genetics, Genomics, Proteomics and Bioinformatics, vol. 4, Wiley. 2005.Where humans can manipulate and integrate the information they receive in subtle and ever changing ways from context to context, computers need structured and context-free background information of a sort which ontologies can help to provide. A domain ontology captures the stable, highly general and commonly accepted core knowledge for an application domain. The domain at issue here is that of the life sciences, in particular molecular biology and bioinformatics. Contemporary life science resear…Read more
-
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
-
The development of non-coding RNA ontologyInternational Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics 15 (3): 214--232. 2016.
-
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
-
37Gestalt psychologyIn Thomas Baldwin (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, . pp. 51-52. 1998.The term ‘Gestalt’ was introduced into psychology by the Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels in an essay entitled “On ‘Gestalt-Qualities’” published in 1890. ‘Gestalt,’ in colloquial German, means roughly: ‘shape’ or ‘structure’ or ‘configuration’, and Ehrenfels demonstrates in his essay that there are certain inherently structural features of experience which need to be acknowledged in addition to simple tones, colours and other mental ‘atoms’ or ‘elements’. His essay thus initiated a …Read more
-
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
-
12Ontological Tools for Geographic RepresentationIn Nicola Guarino (ed.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems, Ios Press. pp. 77-85. 1998.This paper is concerned with certain ontological issues in the foundations of geographic representation. It sets out what these basic issues are, describes the tools needed to deal with them, and draws some implications for a general theory of spatial representation. Our approach has ramifications in the domains of mereology, topology, and the theory of location, and the question of the interaction of these three domains within a unified spatial representation theory is addressed. In the final p…Read more
-
Planning for BASICS MotherCare Wellstart cooperation; reports on Wellstart baseline and AIN community evaluation; and planning for the community perinatal health study May 6-9 1996 Tegucigalpa Honduras (review)Journal of Biosocial Science 28 (2): 141-59. 1996.
-
What I know wheniknow alanguageIn Ernie Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. pp. 941. 2005.
-
8 Common senseIn Barry Smith & David Woodruff Smith (eds.), The Cambridge companion to Husserl, Cambridge University Press. pp. 394. 1995.
-
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.
-
40Ontology and geographic kindsIn T. Poiker & N. Chrisman (eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling, 308–320., International Geographic Union. 1998.An ontology of geographic kinds is designed to yield a better understanding of the structure of the geographic world, and to support the development of geographic information systems that are conceptually sound. This paper first demonstrates that geographical objects and kinds are not just larger versions of the everyday objects and kinds previously studied in cognitive science. Geographic objects are not merely located in space, as are the manipulable objects of table-top space. Rather, they ar…Read more
-
2Switching Partners: Dancing with the Ontological EngineersIn Thomas Bartscherer (ed.), Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, Chicago University Press. pp. 103. 2011.
-
23Sechzehn Tage: Wann beginnt ein menschliches Leben?In Guido Imagire & Christine Schneider (eds.), Untersuchungen zur Ontologie, . pp. 3-40. 2006.When does a human being begin to exist? We argue that it is possible, through a combination of biological fact and philosophical analysis, to provide a definitive answer to this question. We lay down a set of conditions for being a human being, and we determine when, in the course of normal fetal development, these conditions are first satisfied. Issues dealt with along the way include: modes of substance-formation, twinning, the nature of the intra-uterine environment, and the nature of the rel…Read more
-
16Towards a history of speech act theoryIn Barry Smith (ed.), Constraints on Correspondence, Hölder/pichler/tempsky. 1989.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 non-standard aspects of…Read more
-
Topological foundations of cognitive scienceIn Topological foundations of cognitive science, Graduiertenkolleg Kognitionswissenschaft. pp. 3--22. 1994.
-
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
-
50The Curious Case of the Complicated Border: The Story of BaarleDutch International Society Magazine 47 (4): 11-17. 2016.History has left a territory composed of two municipalitics, whose shape is unique, belonging partly to the Netherlands and partly to Belgium. Earlier both parts belonged to the former Duchy of Brabant, a tenitory that is now split up into the Dutch province of Noord-Brabant (including Baarle-Nassau) and thc Belgian provinces of Antwerp (which includes Baarle-Hertog), Vlaams Brabant, Brussels, and Brabant-Wallon. People are quite comfortable with this situation, even though it raises many compli…Read more
-
4Truth-MakersIn Jean-Maurice Monnoyer (ed.), Metaphysics and Truthmakers, Ontos Verlag. pp. 18--9. 2007.Reprint of paper first published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in 1984.
Barry Smith
University at Buffalo
National Center for Ontological Research
-
University at BuffaloDepartment of Philosophy
Biomedical Informatics
Neurology
Computer Science and EngineeringDistinguished Professor, Julian Park Chair -
National Center for Ontological ResearchAdministrator
-
APA Eastern Division
Buffalo, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Ontology |
Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence |
Philosophy of Biology |