As biological and biomedical research increasingly reference the environmental context of the biological entities under study, the need for formalisation and standardisation of environment descriptors is growing. The Environment Ontology (ENVO) is a community-led, open project which seeks to provide an ontology for specifying a wide range of environments relevant to multiple life science disciplines and, through an open participation model, to accommodate the terminological requirements of all those needing to annotate data using ontology classes. This paper summarises ENVO’s motivation, (...) content, structure, adoption, and governance approach. (shrink)

We analyze and compare geometrical theories based on mereology (mereogeometries). Most theories in this area lack in formalization, and this prevents any systematic logical analysis. To overcome this problem, we concentrate on specific interpretations for the primitives and use them to isolate comparable models for each theory. Relying on the chosen interpretations, we introduce the notion of environment structure, that is, a minimal structure that contains a (sub)structure for each theory. In particular, in the case of mereogeometries, the domain of (...) an environment structure is composed of particular subsets of Rn. The comparison of mereogeometrical theories within these environment structures shows dependencies among primitives and provides (relative) definitional equivalences. With one exception, we show that all the theories considered are equivalent in these environment structures. (shrink)

Ontology is the philosophical discipline which aims to understand how things in the world are divided into categories and how these categories are related together. This is exactly what information scientists aim for in creating structured, automated representations, called 'ontologies,' for managing information in fields such as science, government, industry, and healthcare. Currently, these systems are designed in a variety of different ways, so they cannot share data with one another. They are often idiosyncratically structured, accessible only to those who (...) created them, and unable to serve as inputs for automated reasoning. This volume shows, in a nontechnical way and using examples from medicine and biology, how the rigorous application of theories and insights from philosophical ontology can improve the ontologies upon which information management depends. (shrink)

Ontology, since Aristotle, has been conceived as a sort of highly general physics, a science of the types of entities in reality, of the objects, properties, categories and relations which make up the world. At the same time ontology has been for some two thousand years a speculative enterprise. It has rested methodologically on introspection and on the construction and analysis of elaborate world-models and of abstract formal-ontological theories. In the work of Quine and others this ontological theorizing in abstract (...) fashion about the world was supplemented by the study, based on the use of logical methods, of the ontological commitments or presuppositions embodied in scientific theories. In recent years both types of ontological study have found application in the world of information systems, for example in the construction of frameworks for knowledge representation and in database design and translation. As ontology is in this way drawn closer to the domain of real-world applications, the question arises as to whether it is possible to use empirical methods in studying ontological theories. More specifically: can we use empirical methods to test the ontological theories embodied in human cognition? We set forth the outlines of a framework for the formulation and testing of such theories as they relate to the specific domain of geographic objects and categories. (shrink)

This is an informal presentation of the theory of niches understood as ecological contexts. The first part sets out the basic conceptual background. The second part outlines the main principles of the theory and addresses the question of how the theory can be extended to aid our thinking in relation to the special types of causal integrity that characterize niches and niched entities.

We propose the beginnings of a general theory of environments, of the parts or regions of space in which organisms live and move. We draw on two sources: on the one hand on recent work on the ontology of space; and on the other hand on work by ecological scientists on concepts such as territory, habitat, and niche. An environment is in first approximation a volume of space; it is a specific habitat, location, or site that is suitable or adequate (...) for given purposes (of foraging, resting, hunting, breeding, nesting, grooming) in the life of an organism or group of organisms. This spatial notion of environment can be drawn closer to biological and ecological science by taking account of the pertinent physical attributes realized within given spatial regions. (shrink)

What follows is a contribution to the theory of space and of spatial objects. It takes as its starting point the philosophical subfield of ontology, which can be defined as the science of what is: of the various types and categories of objects and relations in all realms of being. More specifically, it begins with ideas set forth by Aristotle in his Categories and Metaphysics, two works which constitute the first great contributions to ontological science. Because Aristotle’s ontological ideas were (...) developed prior to the scientific discoveries of the modern era, he approached the objects and relations of everyday reality with the same ontological seriousness with which scientists today approach the objects of physics. We shall seek to show that what Aristotle has to say about these commonsensical objects and relations can, when translated into more formal terms, be of use also to contemporary ontologists. More precisely, we shall argue that his ideas can contribute to the development of a rigorous theory of those social and institutional components of everyday reality – the settings of human behavior – which are the subject of this volume. When modern-day philosophers turn their attentions to ontology they begin not with Aristotle but rather, in almost every case, with a set-theoretic ontology of the sort which is employed in standard model-theoretic semantics. Set-theoretic ontology sees the world in atomistic terms: it postulates a lowest level of atoms or urelements, from out of which successively higher levels of set-theoretic objects are then constructed. The approach to ontology to be defended here, in contrast, starts not with atoms but with the mesoscopic objects by which we are surrounded in our normal day-to-day.. (shrink)

We propose a modular ontology of the dynamic features of reality. This amounts, on the one hand, to a purely spatial ontology supporting snapshot views of the world at successive instants of time and, on the other hand, to a purely spatiotemporal ontology of change and process. We argue that dynamic spatial ontology must combine these two distinct types of inventory of the entities and relationships in reality, and we provide characterizations of spatiotemporal reasoning in the light of the interconnections (...) between them. (shrink)

Human cognitive acts are directed towards entities of a wide range of different types. What follows is a new proposal for bringing order into this typological clutter. A categorial scheme for the objects of human cognition should be (1) critical and realistic. Cognitive subjects are liable to error, even to systematic error of the sort that is manifested by believers in the Pantheon of Olympian gods. Thus not all putative object-directed acts should be recognized as having objects of their own. (...) What follows is a categorial scheme that is both critically realistic and comprehensive. Thus it enjoys some of the benefits of linguistic idealism and physicalism, without (or so it is hoped) the corresponding disadvantages of each.The starting point for our categorial scheme is the concept of extended entity. (shrink)

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 (...) relation between fetus and mother (connection, parthood, dependence). (shrink)

There is a basic distinction, in the realm of spatial boundaries, between bona fide boundaries on the one hand, and fiat boundaries on the other. The former are just the physical boundaries of old. The latter are exemplified especially by boundaries induced through human demarcation, for example in the geographic domain. The classical problems connected with the notions of adjacency, contact, separation and division can be resolved in an intuitive way by recognizing this two-sorted ontology of boundaries. Bona fide boundaries (...) yield a notion of contact that is effectively modeled by classical topology; the analogue of contact involving fiat boundaries calls, however, for a different account, based on the intuition that fiat boundaries do not support the open/closed distinction on which classical topology is based. In the presence of this two-sorted ontology it then transpires that mereotopology—topology erected on a mereological basis—is more than a trivial formal variant of classical point-set topology. (shrink)

The paper outlines a model-theoretic framework for investigating and comparing a variety of mereotopological theories. In the first part we consider different ways of characterizing a mereotopology with respect to (i) the intended interpretation of the connection primitive, and (ii) the composition of the admissible domains of quantification (e.g., whether or not they include boundary elements). The second part extends this study by considering two further dimensions along which different patterns of topological connection can be classified - the strength of (...) the connection and its multiplicity. (shrink)

The niche has been central to ecology for most of the discipline’s history, yet there have been few attempts by philosophers to work out the ontology of the niche. A challenge is that there is a plurality of seemingly inconsistent definitions of the niche in ecology. This paper characterizes the population-level ecological niche by distinguishing among niche concepts, niche models, and the niche as a phenomenon. I argue that 'niche concepts' should be interpreted as theoretical frameworks or modelling strategies. I (...) also argue that there is a unified niche phenomenon underlying the seemingly heterogeneous models and definitions. The plurality of niche concepts in ecology should be seen as an expected consequence of the nature of modelling complex systems. (shrink)

Consider the following two metaphysical questions about pregnancy: (1) When does a new organism of a certain kind start to exist? (2) What is the mereological and topological relationship between the pregnant organism and with what it is pregnant? Despite assumptions made in the literature, I take these questions to be independent of each other, such that an answer to one does not provide an answer to the other. I argue that the way to connect them is via a maximality (...) principle that prevents one organism being a proper part of another organism of the same kind. That being said, such a maximality principle need not be held, and may not apply in the case of pregnancy. The aims of this paper are thus to distinguish and connect these metaphysical questions, in order to outline a taxonomy of rival mereotopological models of pregnancy that result from the various combinations of their answers. (shrink)

The book’s core argument is that an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence—sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is for mathematical reasons impossible. It offers two specific reasons for this claim: Human intelligence is a capability of a complex dynamic system—the human brain and central nervous system. Systems of this sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a computer. In supporting their claim, the authors, Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith, marshal evidence (...) from mathematics, physics, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, and biology, setting up their book around three central questions: What are the essential marks of human intelligence? What is it that researchers try to do when they attempt to achieve "artificial intelligence" (AI)? And why, after more than 50 years, are our most common interactions with AI, for example with our bank’s computers, still so unsatisfactory? Landgrebe and Smith show how a widespread fear about AI’s potential to bring about radical changes in the nature of human beings and in the human social order is founded on an error. There is still, as they demonstrate in a final chapter, a great deal that AI can achieve which will benefit humanity. But these benefits will be achieved without the aid of systems that are more powerful than humans, which are as impossible as AI systems that are intrinsically "evil" or able to "will" a takeover of human society. (shrink)

This paper is in two parts. Part 1 examines the phenomenon of making space as a process involving one or other kind of legal decision-making, for example when a state authority authorizes the creation of a new highway along a certain route or the creation of a new park in a certain location. In cases such as this a new abstract spatial entity comes into existence – the route, the area set aside for the park – followed only later by (...) concordant changes in physical reality. In Part 2 we show that features identified in studying this phenomenon of legal spacemaking can be detected in other spheres of human activity, for example in planning (where spacemaking is projected into the future), and in reasoning about history (where spacemaking is projected back through time). We shall see that these features display themselves in especially complex ways in our everyday use of language, and we conclude by examining the implications of this complexity for attempts to create an artificial intelligence that would enjoy a mastery of language that would be equivalent to that of human beings. (shrink)

When did we begin to exist? Barry Smith and Berit Brogaard argue that a new human organism comes into existence neither earlier nor later than the moment of gastrulation: 16 days after conception. Several critics have responded that the onset of the organism must happen earlier; closer to conception. This article makes a radically different claim: if we accept Smith and Brogaard’s ontological commitments, then human organisms start, on average, roughly nine months after conception. The main point of contention is (...) whether the fetus is or is not part of the maternal organism. Smith and Brogaard argue that it is not; I demonstrate that it is. This claim in combination with Smith and Brogaard’s own criteria commits to the view that human organisms begin, precisely, at birth. (shrink)

Festschrift in Honor of Barry Smith on the occasion of his 65th Birthday. Published as issue 4:4 of the journal Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization. Includes contributions by Wolfgang Grassl, Nicola Guarino, John T. Kearns, Rudolf Lüthe, Luc Schneider, Peter Simons, Wojciech Żełaniec, and Jan Woleński.

What is the metaphysical relationship between the fetus/embryo and the pregnant organism? In this paper I apply a substance metaphysics view developed by Barry Smith and Berit Brogaard to argue, on the basis of topological connectedness, that fetuses/embryos are Lady-Parts: part of the maternal organism up until birth. This leaves two options. Either mammalian organisms begin at birth, or we revise our conception of organisms such that mammalian organisms can be part of other mammals. The first option has some advantages: (...) it is numerically neat; aligns with an intuitive picture of organisms as physically distinct individuals; and ties ‘coming into existence’ to a suitably recognisable and important event: birth. But it denies that the fetus survives birth, or that human organisms existed prior to their birth. The second option allows us to recognise that human organisms exist prior to and survive their birth, but at a cost: it leaves the question of when an organism comes into existence unanswered, and demands potentially far-reaching conceptual revision across a range of domains. (shrink)

The objective of this research programme is to contribute to the establishment of the emerging science of Formal Ontology in Information Systems via a collaborative project involving researchers from a range of disciplines including philosophy, logic, computer science, linguistics, and the medical sciences. The re­searchers will work together on the construction of a unified formal ontology, which means: a general framework for the construction of ontological theories in specific domains. The framework will be constructed using the axiomatic-deductive method of modern (...) formal ontology. It will be tested via a series of applications relating to on-going work in Leipzig on medical taxonomies and data dictionaries in the context of clinical trials. This will lead to the production of a domain-specific ontology which is designed to serve as a basis for applications in the medical field. (shrink)

A scientific explanatory project, part-whole explanation, and a kind of science, part-whole science are premised on identifying, investigating, and using parts and wholes. In the biological sciences, mechanistic, structuralist, and historical explanations are part-whole explanations. Each expresses different norms, explananda, and aims. Each is associated with a distinct partitioning frame for abstracting kinds of parts. These three explanatory projects can be complemented in order to provide an integrative vision of the whole system, as is shown for a detailed case study: (...) the tetrapod limb. My diagnosis of part-whole explanation in the biological sciences as well as in other domains exploring evolved, complex, and integrated systems (e.g., psychology and cognitive science) cross-cuts standard philosophical categories of explanation: causal explanation and explanation as unification. Part-whole explanation is itself one essential aspect of part-whole science. (shrink)

Organisms' environments are thought to play a fundamental role in determining their fitness and hence in natural selection. Existing intuitive conceptions of environment are sufficient for biological practice. I argue, however, that attempts to produce a general characterization of fitness and natural selection are incomplete without the help of general conceptions of what conditions are included in the environment. Thus there is a "problem of the reference environment"—more particularly, problems of specifying principles which pick out those environmental conditions which determine (...) fitness. I distinguish various reference environment problems and propose solutions to some of them. While there has been a limited amount of work on problems concerning what I call "subenvironments", there appears to be no earlier work on problems of what I call the "whole environment". The first solution I propose for a whole environment problem specifies the overall environment for natural selection on a set of biological types present in a population over a specified period of time. The second specifies an environment relevant to extinction of types in a population; this kind of environment is especially relevant to certain kinds of long-term evolution. (shrink)

If mind is a creature of adaptation, then our standard theories of intentionality and of mental representation are in need of considerable revision. For such theories, deriving under Cartesian inspiration from the work of Brentano, Husserl and their followers, are context-free. They conceive the subject of mental experience in isolation from any surrounding physico-biological environment. Husserl sought in his later writings to find room for the surrounding world of human practical experience, and a similar expansion of concerns can be detected (...) also in the writings of other later phenomenologists such as Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. But in none of these authors do we find sustained attempts to grapple with the intervolvements of the world of human thought, feeling and action with the environment of human behavior as this is described by physics and biology. Their work can, however, be seen in a new light when conjoined with the ideas on perception and action of J. J. Gibson and Roger Barker, both of whom (independently) conceived their work under the banner of 'ecological psychology.' It is against this background that the term 'Husserlian ecology' is to be understood in this essay. (shrink)

Se leggiamo tra le righe del suo lavoro, possiamo scoprire che Varzi prende i mostri molto sul serio. Troviamo, per esempio, mostri mereologici frutto della composizione non ristretta, come l’entità costituita dalla metà sinistra di questa mela e dal bracciolo di quella poltrona.10 Oppure mostri topologici dai quali una teoria mereotopologica delle nicche deve rifuggire, come le curve riempispazio di Peano e Hilbert.11 O, ancora, mostri ontologici come l’antimateria;12 le entità “inesistenti” che, come si sa, non possono esistere, dato che (...) non ci sono cose che non esistono; e le entità “negative”: buchi, mancanze e omissioni, conferenze non date.13 In questo contributo, seguendo il suggerimento di Varzi, parlerò, appunto, di mostri, prendendo l’avvio da alcune creature che popolano il regno della finzione, per poi passare a trattare dei mostri che popolano il nostro mondo. Essendo poco lo spazio e molti i mostri, procederò dapprima proponendone una tassonomia – punto di partenza per ogni generalizzazione che si rispetti – e in seguito cercando di illustrare perché i mostri vadano presi sul serio in metafisica. È d’obbligo precisare che si tratterà di una tassonomia parziale e provvisoria, ma lo è altrettanto ricordare che le tassonomie, quelle biologiche in particolare, lo sono sempre, per due ragioni. In parte, perché la vita è in costante evoluzione, in parte perché le nostre conoscenze e decisioni condizionano la struttura e i contenuti dei nostri sistemi di categorie: basti pensare che la prima edizione del Systema naturae di Linneo contava undici pagine, mentre la tredicesima ben tremila, ripartite in sei volumi. Quando un tassonomo scopre un organismo che ritiene – dopo accurati esami comparativi – essere appartenente a una specie fino ad allora sconosciuta, ne deposita nella letteratura scientifica, insieme al nome binomiale (cioè il nome specifico, composto dall’indicazione del genere e della specie, come Homo sapiens), una descrizione in termini di caratteri fenetici. Quel token è chiamato tipo nomenclaturale, o esemplare-tipo, ed è il portatore del nome della specie di cui viene considerato tipo. Sulla falsariga della procedura appena descritta, riporterò la descrizione di alcuni tipi nomenclaturali per una tassonomia mostruosa che si baserà su tre criteri principali: (1) l’origine, (2) la costituzione genetica, (3) l’aspetto fenotipico. Prima di procedere, vorrei però sottolineare tre rispetti sotto i quali classificare mostri mitologici differisce dal classificare individui “ordinari”. Innanzitutto, nel caso dei mostri mitologici non è possibile, a causa del frequente intervento divino, ricorrere al criterio dell’interfecondità per stabilire se due mostri appartengono alla medesima specie. Ma d’altro canto, tale criterio, benché sia abbastanza affidabile per gli animali, non lo è affatto, per ragioni diverse dai mostri, per molte piante, alghe e funghi. Un’altra peculiarità da segnalare – di cui però non avremo modo di occuparci oltre – è che le entità mitologiche sono frequentemente soggette a trasformazioni sostanziali, mentre la nostra biologia sembra, aristotelicamente, escluderne la possibilità: una tigre non può trasformarsi in un canguro, pena la sua uscita dall’esistenza. Meno paradossalmente, una larva di mosca e la mosca adulta saranno considerate appartenenti alla medesima sorta – la mosca, appunto – benché dall’una all’altra non vi sia praticamente alcuna continuità materiale (nella metamorfosi la larva viene distrutta quasi completamente e l’adulto si genera a partire da pochi aggregati cellulari indifferenziati). Infine, nel caso dei mostri mitologici, parlerò più genericamente di “gruppo tassonomico” anziché di “specie” (e dunque il nome dei tipi nomenclaturali non sarà un nome binomiale) dal momento che, come diverrà chiaro nel corso della lettura, è proprio il concetto di “specie” come diverrà chiaro nel corso della lettura, è proprio il concetto di “specie” come articolazione naturale non oltrepassabile che i mostri che andiamo a classificare ci chiedono di mettere in discussione. (shrink)

The perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson embraces a radically externalistic view of mind and action. We have, for Gibson, not a Cartesian mind or soul, with its interior theater of contents and the consequent problem of explaining how this mind or soul and its psychological environment can succeed in grasping physical objects external to itself. Rather, we have a perceiving, acting organism, whose perceptions and actions are always already tuned to the parts and moments, the things and surfaces, of its (...) external environment. We describe how on this basis Gibson sought to develop a realist science of environments which will be ‘consistent with physics, mechanics, optics, acoustics, and chemistry’. (shrink)

We think of a boundary whenever we think of an entity demarcated from its surroundings. There is a boundary (a line) separating Maryland and Pennsylvania. There is a boundary (a circle) isolating the interior of a disc from its exterior. There is a boundary (a surface) enclosing the bulk of this apple. Sometimes the exact location of a boundary is unclear or otherwise controversial (as when you try to trace out the margins of Mount Everest, or even the boundary of (...) your own body). Sometimes the boundary lies skew to any physical discontinuity or qualitative differentiation (as with the border of Wyoming, or the boundary between the upper and lower halves of a homogeneous sphere). But whether sharp or blurry, natural or artificial, for every object there appears to be a boundary that marks it off from the rest of the world. Events, too, have boundaries — at least temporal boundaries. Our lives are bounded by our births and by our deaths; the soccer game began at 3pm sharp and ended with the referee's final whistle at 4:45pm. It is sometimes suggested that even abstract entities, such as concepts or sets, have boundaries of their own, and Wittgenstein could emphatically proclaim that the boundaries of our language are the boundaries of our world. Whether all this boundary talk is coherent, however, and whether it reflects the structure of the world or simply the organizing activity of our mind, are matters of deep philosophical controversy. (shrink)

There is no question that the constituents of cells and organisms are joined together by the part-whole relation. Genes are part of cells, and cells are part of organisms. Species taxa, however, have traditionally been conceived of, not as wholes with parts, but as classes with members. But why does the relation change abruptly from part-whole to class-membership above the level of organisms? Ghiselin, Hull and others have argued that it doesn't. Cells and organisms are cohesive mereological sums, and since (...) species taxa are like cells and organisms in the relevant respects, they, too, are cohesive mereological sums. I provide further reasons in support of the thesis that species are mereological sums. I argue, moreover, that the advocate of this thesis is committed to a form of pluralism with respect to the species concept. (shrink)

The notion of affordance remains elusive, notwithstanding its importance for the representation of agency, cognition, and behaviors. This paper lays down a foundation for an ontology of affordances by elaborating the idea of “core affordance” which would serve as a common ground for explaining existing diverse conceptions of affordances and their interrelationships. For this purpose, it analyzes M. T. Turvey’s dispositional theory of affordances in light of a formal ontology of dispositions. Consequently, two kinds of so-called “core affordances” are proposed: (...) specific and general ones. Inspired directly by Turvey’s original account, a specific core affordance is intimately connected to a specific agent, as it is reciprocal with a counterpart effectivity (which is a disposition) of this agent within the agent-environment system. On the opposite, a general core affordance does not depend on individual agents; rather, its realization involves an action by an instance of a determinate class of agents. The utility of such core affordances is illustrated by examining how they can be leveraged to formalize other major accounts of affordances. Additionally, it is briefly outlined how core affordances can be employed to analyze three notions that are closely allied with affordances: the environment, image schemas, and intentions. (shrink)

Space is a product of semiosis. It is a condition pertinent to an organism’s semiotic freedom, which is articulated by the organism as a consequence of its capacity to manipulate the world in the course of its unfolding interaction with its environment. Spatial configuration is thus the result of agency inherent in the organism-in-its-environment. Space, a consequence of social cohesion, is effected through constraints and processes of enaction which are semiotic. These processes are productive and offer architects a novel means (...) by which to configure space, which they should embrace to articulate the nature of inhabitation. The model presented identifies activity as the essential building block to the generation of form. Modelled as a form of artificial life, swarm-like components, referred to as ‘actants’, represent discrete activities and self-configure according to differences in the environment they detect, to form a body-of-swarms. Thus, depicting the spatiality of being. (shrink)

The best way to conceive semiotical spaces that are not identical to single buildings, such as a cityscape, is to define the place in terms of the activities occurring there. This conception originated in the proxemics of E. T. Hall and was later generalized in the spatial semiotics of Manar Hammad. It can be given a more secure grounding in terms of time geography, which is involved with trajectories in space and time. We add to this a qualitative dimension which (...) is properly semiotic, and which derives from the notion of border, itself a result of the primary semiotic operation of segmentation. Borders, in this sense, are more or less permeable to different kinds of activities, such as gaze, touch, and movement, where the latter are often not physically defined, but characterized in terms of norms. Norms must be understood along the lines of the Prague school, which delineates as scale going from laws in the legal sense to simple rules of thumb. Such considerations have permitted us to define a number of semio-spatial objects as, most notably, the boulevard, considered as an intermediate level of public space, located between the village square and the coffee house presiding over what Habermas called the public sphere. Urbanity originates as a scene on which the gaze, well before the word, mediates between the sexes, the classes, the cultures, and other avatars of otherness. However, this scenario is seriously upset but the emergence of the cell phone and other technical devices, as well as by the movement of populations. (shrink)

A formal theory of the ecological niche is indispensable not only for semantic precision in philosophy to understand and compare it with other meanings of niche, but also when computer scientists and ecologists desire to create interoperable software where one can retrieve the niche of a species and compare their parameters. The proposed model is a more fine-grained description of the ecological niche, including the distinction between its complex concept, the abstract niche (‘fundamental niche’) with its hypervolume in multidimensional space, (...) and its realisations (‘realised niches’). The presented ecological niche may initiate new avenues for research in ecology, particularly concerning the conditions/categories of a hypervolume, as well as further philosophical inquiry and comparison with other niches. (shrink)

Vivoscape, from Latin ‘vivo’ and the English ‘scape’ is presented as a new ecosemiotic agency that integrates the interactions between biological and ecological components of a taxon with the environment. According to this model, the interactions between species and the environment are fused into a new functional unity driven by external and internal events. Sensorial and relational channels are used by a taxon to sense external energy gradients, matter, information and to return actions and proactions in an external operational environment. (...) The eco-field model is suggested as the functional ecosemiotic mechanism associated with each vivoevent. (shrink)

The tendency theory of causation and its use in ontological engineering is described.

This paper aims to elucidate a kind of ignorance that is more fundamental than a momentary lack of information, but also not a kind of ignorance that is built into the subject’s cognitive apparatus such that the subject can’t do anything about it. The paper sets forth the notion of cognitive confinement, which is a contingent, yet relatively stable state of being structurally or systematically unable to gain information from an environment, determined by patterns of interaction between the subject and (...) the world. In order to unpack the idea of cognitive confinement the paper discusses niche construction theory, and then, in greater detail, the notion of cognitive niche once proposed by John Tooby and Irven DeVore. Cognitive confinement is here imagined as a pathologized form of cognitive niche. This posit is substantiated by referring to a case that has come to the fore in recent years and raised debate around the world: the rise of so-called filter bubbles. They turn out to be instantiations of a more general phenomenon of cognitive confinement. (shrink)

The paper discusses the concept of the cognitive niche and distinguishes the latter from the metabolic niche. By using these posits I unpack certain ideas that are crucial for the enactivist movement, especially for its original formulation proposed by Varela, Thompson and Rosh. Drawing on the ontology of location, boundaries, and parthood, I argue that enacting the world can be seen as the process of cognitive niche construction. Moreover, it turns out that enactivism—as seen through the lens of the conceptual (...) framework proposed in the paper—considers cognition as a kind of connection between the subject and the world. This post is pointed to as the key idea laid down in enactivism. (shrink)

This essay considers implications of formal mereologies and ontologies for medical metaphysics. Edward Fried’s extensional mereological account of the human body is taken as representative of a prominent strand in analytic metaphysics that has close affinities with medical positivism. I show why such accounts fail. First, I consider how Fried attempts to make sense of the medical case of Barney Clark, the first recipient of an artificial heart, and show that his analytic metaphysical categories do not have the right kind (...) of fit with the case. A proper medical metaphysic should involve a richer two way dialogue with medicine, and it should not just “apply” formal accounts worked out in other settings. Second, I argue that any effort to account for real wholes with extensional mereological sums requires all sorts of ad hoc, supplementary mechanisms that do the real work, and the full repertoire of these mechanisms involves inconsistencies and semantic shifts. Finally, I consider an alternative strand of work on non-extensional whole/part relations that is closer to medicine and that can deepen reflection on some core problems in bioethics, for example, associated with the determination of death when an organism ceases to function as a whole. In addition to the utility such formal ontologies have for addressing traditional problems such as the determination of death, philosophers of medicine should appreciate the increasingly influential role such formal tools are playing in the development of data system ontologies. Assumptions integral to these ontologies have far reaching implications for the way future research and practice in medicine will be conducted, and much greater critical reflection is needed on the full range of issues associated with the development and use of such medical ontologies. (shrink)

The present essay aims at integrating different concepts of meaning developed in semiotics, biology, and cognitive science, in a way that permits the formulation of issues involving evolution and development. The concept of sign in semiotics, just like the notion of representation in cognitive science, have either been used too broadly, or outright rejected. My earlier work on the notions of iconicity and pictoriality has forced me to spell out the taken-forgranted meaning of the sign concept, both in the Saussurean (...) and the Peircean tradition. My work with the evolution and development of semiotic resources such as language, gesture, and pictures has proved the need of having recourse to a more specified concept of sign. To define the sign, I take as point of departure the notion of semiotic function (by Piaget), and the notion of appresentation (by Husserl). In the first part of this essay, I compare cognitive science and semiotics, in particular as far as the parallel concepts of representation and sign are concerned. The second part is concerned with what is probably the most important attempt to integrate cognitive science and semiotics that has been presented so far, The Symbolic Species, by Terrence Deacon. I criticize Deacon’s use of notions such as iconicity, indexicality, and symbolicity. I choose to separate the sign concept from the notions of iconicity, indexicality, and symbolicity, which only in combination with the sign give rise to icons, indices, and symbols, but which, beyond that, have other, more elemental, uses in the world of perception. In the third part, I discuss some ideas about meaning in biosemiotics, which I show not to involve signs in the sense characterised earlier in the essay. Instead, they use meaning in the general sense of selection and organisation, which is a more elementary sense of meaning. Although I admit that there is a possible interpretation of Peirce, which could be taken to correspond to Uexküll’s idea of functional circle, and to meaning as function described by Emmeche and Hoffmeyer, I claim thatthis is a different sense of meaning than the one embodied in the sign concept. Finally, I suggest that more thresholds of meaning than proposed, for instanceby Kull, are necessary to accommodate the differences between meaning (in the broad sense) and sign (as specified in the Piaget–Husserl tradition). (shrink)

Many bioethical arguments rely implicitly on the assumption that the concept of “human part” is one on which everyone must agree, because it is unambiguous. But various parties interpret this “unambiguous” term in incompatible ways, leading to contention. This article is an informal presentation of a topomereological system on whose preferred interpretation several distinct but related meanings of “human part” can be isolated: part of a human body, part of the completion of a human body, and part of a human (...) being. A case is analyzed (the first total artificial heart (TAH) implantation), demonstrating in the process much of the apparatus of the system. By means of a casuistic methodology, the analysis is translated into recommendations for the ethical conduct of future TAH research. The more general conclusion, however, is that formal methods may provide useful tools for clarifying thought processes and organizing arguments in debates over bioethical issues. (shrink)