Nihilism is the thesis that no composite objects exist. Some ontologists have advocated abandoning nihilism in favor of deep nihilism, the thesis that composites do not existO, where to existO is to be in the domain of the most fundamental quantifier. By shifting from an existential to an existentialO thesis, the deep nihilist seems to secure all the benefits of a composite-free ontology without running afoul of ordinary belief in the existence of composites. I argue that, while there are well-known (...) reasons for accepting nihilism, there appears to be no reason at all to accept deep nihilism. In particular, deep nihilism draws no support either from the usual arguments for nihilism or from considerations of parsimony. (shrink)

The emerging field of synthetic biology aims to engineer novel biological entities. The envisioned future bio-based economy builds largely on “cell factories”: organisms that have been metabolically engineered to sustainably produce substances for human ends. In this paper, we argue that synthetic biology’s goal of creating efficient production vessels for industrial applications implies a set of ontological assumptions according to which living organisms are machines. Traditionally, a machine is understood as a technological, isolated and controllable production unit consisting of parts. (...) But modified organisms, or hybrids, require us to think beyond the machine paradigm and its associated dichotomies between artificial and natural, organisms and artefacts. We ask: How may we conceptualise hybrids beyond limiting ontological categories? Our main claim is that the hybrids created by synthetic biology should be considered not as machines but as metabolic systems. We shall show how the philosophical account of metabolism can inform an ontology of hybrids that moves beyond what we call the “machine ontology”, considering that metabolism enables thinking beyond the dominant dichotomies and allows us to understand and design lifeforms in a bio-based economy. Thus, the aim of this paper is twofold: first, to develop the philosophical ontology of hybrids, and second, to move synthetic biology beyond the problematically limiting view of hybrids. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically assess different interpretations of Bohmian mechanics that are not committed to an ontology based on the wave function being an actual physical object that inhabits configuration space. More specifically, my aim is to explore the connection between the denial of configuration space realism and another interpretive debate that is specific to Bohmian mechanics: the quantum potential versus guidance approaches. Whereas defenders of the quantum potential approach to the theory claim that Bohmian mechanics is better formulated (...) as quasi-Newtonian, via the postulation of forces proportional to acceleration; advocates of the guidance approach defend the notion that the theory is essentially first-order and incorporates some concepts akin to those of Aristotelian physics. Here I analyze whether the desideratum of an interpretation of Bohmian mechanics that is both explanatorily adequate and not committed to configuration space realism favors one of these two approaches to the theory over the other. Contrary to some recent claims in the literature, I argue that the quasi-Newtonian approach based on the idea of a quantum potential does not come out the winner. (shrink)

Notions such as śūnyatā, catuṣkoṭi, and Indra's net, which figure prominently in Buddhist philosophy, are difficult to readily accommodate within our ordinary thinking about everyday objects. Famous Buddhist scholar Nāgārjuna considered two levels of reality: one called conventional reality, and the other ultimate reality. Within this framework, śūnyatā refers to the claim that at the ultimate level objects are devoid of essence or "intrinsic properties", but are interdependent by virtue of their relations to other objects. Catuṣkoṭi refers to the claim (...) that four truth values, including contradiction, are admissible in reasoning. Indra's net refers to the claim that every part of a whole is reflective of the whole. Here we present category theoretic constructions that are reminiscent of these Buddhist concepts. The universal mapping property definition of mathematical objects, wherein objects of a universe of discourse are defined not in terms of their content, but in terms of their relations to all objects of the universe is reminiscent of śūnyatā. The objective logic of perception, with perception modeled as [a category of] two sequential processes (sensation followed by interpretation), and with its truth value object of four truth values, is reminiscent of the Buddhist logic of catuṣkoṭi. The category of categories, wherein every category has a subcategory of sets with zero structure within which every category can be modeled, is reminiscent of Indra's net. Our thorough elaboration of the parallels between Buddhist philosophy and category theory can facilitate better understanding of Buddhist philosophy, and bring out the broader philosophical import of category theory beyond mathematics. (shrink)

Intellectual history still quite commonly distinguishes between the episode we know as the Scientific Revolution, and its successor era, the Enlightenment, in terms of the calculatory and quantifying zeal of the former—the age of mechanics—and the rather scientifically lackadaisical mood of the latter, more concerned with freedom, public space and aesthetics. It is possible to challenge this distinction in a variety of ways, but the approach I examine here, in which the focus on an emerging scientific field or cluster of (...) disciplines—the ‘life sciences’, particularly natural history, medicine, and physiology —is, not Romantically anti-scientific, but resolutely anti-mathematical. Diderot bluntly states, in his Thoughts on the interpretation of nature, that “We are on the verge of a great revolution in the sciences. Given the taste people seem to have for morals, belles-lettres, the history of nature and experimental physics, I dare say that before a hundred years, there will not be more than three great geometricians remaining in Europe. The science will stop short where the Bernoullis, the Eulers, the Maupertuis, the Clairauts, the Fontaines and the D’Alemberts will have left it.... We will not go beyond.” Similarly, Buffon in the first discourse of his Histoire naturelle speaks of the “over-reliance on mathematical sciences,” given that mathematical truths are merely “definitional” and “demonstrative,” and thereby “abstract, intellectual and arbitrary.” Earlier in the Thoughts, Diderot judges “the thing of the mathematician” to have “as little existence in nature as that of the gambler.” Significantly, this attitude—taken by great scientists who also translated Newton or wrote careful papers on probability theory, as well as by others such as Mandeville—participates in the effort to conceptualize what we might call a new ontology for the emerging life sciences, very different from both the ‘iatromechanism’ and the ‘animism’ of earlier generations, which either failed to account for specifically living, goal-directed features of organisms, or accounted for them in supernaturalistic terms by appealing to an ‘anima’ as explanatory principle. Anti-mathematicism here is then a key component of a naturalistic, open-ended project to give a successful reductionist model of explanation in ‘natural history’, a model which is no more vitalist than it is materialist—but which is fairly far removed from early modern mechanism. (shrink)

My topic is the materialist appropriation of empiricism – as conveyed in the ‘minimal credo’ nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu (which interestingly is not just a phrase repeated from Hobbes and Locke to Diderot, but is also a medical phrase, used by Harvey, Mandeville and others). That is, canonical empiricists like Locke go out of their way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall (...) not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind” (Essay, I.i.2, in Locke 1975; which Kant gets exactly wrong in his reading of Locke, in the Preface to the A edition of the first Critique). Indeed, I have suggested elsewhere, contrary to a prevalent reading of Locke, that the Essay is not the extension to the study of the mind of the methods of natural philosophy; that he is actually not the “underlabourer” of Newton and Boyle he claims politely to be in the Epistle to the Reader (Wolfe and Salter 2009, Wolfe 2010). Rather, Locke says quite directly if we pay heed to such passages, “Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our Conduct” (Essay, I.i.6). There would be more to say here about what this implies for our understanding of empiricism (see Norton 1981 and Gaukroger 2005), but instead I shall focus on a different aspect of this episode: how a non-naturalistic claim which falls under what we now call epistemology (a claim about the senses as the source of knowledge) becomes an ontology – materialism. That is, how an empiricist claim could shift from being about the sources of knowledge to being about the nature of reality (and/or the mind, in which case it needs, as David Hartley saw and Denis Diderot proclaimed more overtly, an account of the relation between mental processes and the brain). (David Armstrong, for one, denied that there could be an identification between empiricism and materialism on this point: eighteenth-century history of science seems to prove him wrong: see Armstrong 1968 and 1978.) Put differently, I want to examine the shift from the logic of ideas in the seventeenth century (Locke) to an eighteenth-century focus on what kind of ‘world’ the senses give us (Condillac), to an assertion that there is only one substance in the universe (Diderot, giving a materialist cast to Spinozism), and that we need an account of the material substrate of mental life. This is neither a ‘scientific empiricism’ nor a linear developmental process from philosophical empiricism to natural science, but something else again: the unpredictable emergence of an ontology on empiricist grounds. (shrink)

In Lowe’s Four-Category Ontology, instantiation is a basic formal ontological relation between particulars (objects, modes) and their kinds (kinds, attributes). Therefore, instantiation must be considered as a metaphysically necessary relation, which also rules out the metaphysical possibility of kind change. Nevertheless, according to Lowe, objects obtain their identity conditions in a more general level than specific natural kinds, which allows for kind change. There also seems to be actual examples of kind change. The advocate of Four-Category Ontology is obliged to (...) resolve the tension between these mutually incompatible claims. In this article, we argue that the only viable option for the advocate of Four-Category Ontology is to bite the bullet and stick to the necessity of each of the most specific natural kind to the object instantiating it. As a major drawback, the four-category ontologist does not have any credible means to allow for kind change or determination of the identity conditions in a more general level. (shrink)

This paper elaborates on relationalism about space and time as motivated by a minimalist ontology of the physical world: there are only matter points that are individuated by the distance relations among them, with these relations changing. We assess two strategies to combine this ontology with physics, using classical mechanics as example: the Humean strategy adopts the standard, non-relationalist physical theories as they stand and interprets their formal apparatus as the means of bookkeeping of the change of the distance relations (...) instead of committing us to additional elements of the ontology. The alternative theory strategy seeks to combine the relationalist ontology with a relationalist physical theory that reproduces the predictions of the standard theory in the domain where these are empirically tested. We show that, as things stand, this strategy cannot be accomplished without compromising a minimalist relationalist ontology. (shrink)

Consider a game of blind chess between two chess masters that is recorded in some standard chess notation. The recording is a representation of the game. But what is the game itself? This question is, we believe, central to the entire domain of social ontology. We argue that the recorded game is a special sort of quasi-abstract pattern, something that is: (i) like abstract entities such as numbers or forms, in that it is both nonphysical and nonpsychological; but at the (...) same time, (ii) through its association with specific players and a specific occasion, tied to time and history. We discover other abstract patterns of this sort especially in the domains of law and commerce. This essay draws on the work in social ontology, we of Hernando de Soto and of John Searle to develop an ontology of the social world based on an analysis of the peculiar interdependence between quasi-abstract patterns and their representations in documents of different sorts. (shrink)

This paper investigates the connection between temporal attitudes (attitudes characterised by a concern (or lack thereof) about future and past events), beliefs about temporal ontology (beliefs about the existence of future and past events) and temporal preferences (preferences regarding where in time events are located). Our aim is to probe the connection between these preferences, attitudes, and beliefs, in order to better evaluate the normative status of these preferences. We investigate the hypothesis that there is a three-way association between (a) (...) being present-biased (that is, preferring that positive events are located in the present, and negative events are located in the non-present), (b) believing that past and future events do not exist and (c) tending to have present-focused rather than non-present-focused temporal attitudes. We find no such association. This suggests that insofar as temporal preferences and temporal attitudes are connected to the ways we represent time, they are not connected to the ways we represent temporal ontology; rather, they are more likely connected to the ways we represent relative movement in, or of, time. This has important consequences for, first, explaining why we exhibit these preferences and, second, for their normative evaluation. (shrink)

I argue that a two-dimensional model of social objects is uniquely positioned to deliver explanations for some of the puzzling metaphysical features of words. I consider how a type-token model offers explanations for the metaphysical features of words, but I give reasons to find the model wanting. In its place, I employ an alternative model from social ontology to explain the puzzling data and questions that are generated from the metaphysical features of words. In the end I chart a new (...) path that foregrounds the agent-dependence and social conditions for word kinds. (shrink)

This paper is a study of Brentano’s ontology, and more specifically of his theory of substance and accident as put forward toward the end of his life in the materials collected together as the Kategorienlehre or Theory of Categories. Here Brentano presents an auditious (re-)interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of substance and accidence. We show that on the Brentano initially defends, it is space which serves as the single substance upon which all other entities depend as accidents of space. In an (...) appendix, however, Brentano puts forward an even more radical suggestion, inspired by the physics of Kelvin. According to this final view, space itself is an accident of a deeper substance: the present time. (shrink)

After some suggestions about how to clarify the confused metaphysical distinctions between dispositional and non-dispositional or categorical properties, I review some of the main interpretations of QM in order to show that – with the relevant exception of Bohm’s minimalist interpretation – quantum ontology is irreducibly dispositional. Such an irreducible character of dispositions must be explained differently in different interpretations, but the reducibility of the contextual properties in the case of Bohmian mechanics is guaranteed by the fact that the positions (...) of particles play the role of the categorical basis, a role that in other interpretations cannot be filled by anything else. In Bohr’s and Everett-type interpretations, dispositionalism is instrumentalism in disguise. (shrink)

I argue for the usefulness of the evolutionary kind of biological individual.

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted immense work on the investigation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Rapid, accurate, and consistent interpretation of generated data is thereby of fundamental concern. Ontologies––structured, controlled, vocabularies––are designed to support consistency of interpretation, and thereby to prevent the development of data silos. This paper describes how ontologies are serving this purpose in the COVID-19 research domain, by following principles of the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry and by reusing existing ontologies such as the Infectious Disease Ontology (...) (IDO) Core, which provides terminological content common to investigations of all infectious diseases. We report here on the development of an IDO extension, the Virus Infectious Disease Ontology (VIDO), a reference ontology covering viral infectious diseases. We motivate term and definition choices, showcase reuse of terms from existing OBO ontologies, illustrate how ontological decisions were motivated by relevant life science research, and connect VIDO to the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO). We next use terms from these ontologies to annotate selections from life science research on SARS-CoV-2, highlighting how ontologies employing a common upper-level vocabulary may be seamlessly interwoven. Finally, we outline future work, including bacteria and fungus infectious disease reference ontologies currently under development, then cite uses of VIDO and CIDO in host-pathogen data analytics, electronic health record annotation, and ontology conflict-resolution projects. (shrink)

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the previous SARS/MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012 have resulted in a series of major global public health crises. We argue that in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs and to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechenisms it is necessary to integrate the large and exponentially growing body of heterogeneous coronavirus data. Ontologies play an important role in standard-based knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. Accordingly, we initiated the (...) development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology in early 2020. -/- As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. CIDO is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology and Viral Infectious Disease Ontology. CIDO has imported terms from over 30 OBO ontologies. For example, CIDO imports all SARS-CoV-2 protein terms from the Protein Ontology, COVID-19-related phenotype terms from the Human Phenotype Ontology, and over 100 COVID-19 terms for vaccines (both authorized and in clinical trial) from the Vaccine Ontology. CIDO systematically represents variants of SARS-CoV-2 viruses and over 300 amino acid substitutions therein, along with over 300 diagnostic kits and methods. CIDO also describes hundreds of host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and the drugs that target proteins in these PPIs. CIDO has been used to model COVID-19 related phenomena in areas such as epidemiology. The scope of CIDO was evaluated by visual analysis supported by a summarization network method. CIDO has been used in various applications such as term standardization, inference, natural language processing (NLP) and clinical data integration. We have applied the amino acid variant knowledge present in CIDO to analyze differences between SARS-CoV-2 Delta and Omicron variants. CIDO's integrative host-coronavirus PPIs and drug-target knowledge has also been used to support drug repurposing for COVID-19 treatment. -/- CIDO represents entities and relations in the domain of coronavirus diseases with a special focus on COVID-19. It supports shared knowledge representation, data and metadata standardization and integration, and has been used in a range of applications. (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)

It is often thought that the boundaries and properties of art-kinds are determined by the things we say and think about them. More recently, this tendency has manifested itself as concept-descriptivism, the view that the reference of art-kind terms is fixed by the ontological properties explicitly or implicitly ascribed to art and art-kinds by competent users of those terms. Competent users are therefore immune from radical error in their ascriptions; the result is that the ontology of art must begin and (...) end with conceptual analysis. Against this tendency towards concept-driven ontology, I offer a trio of objections derived from: the cultural and temporal variability of concepts of art, the systematic tendency, on the part of would-be ontological assessors, to err on the side of familiar categories or, conversely, to exaggerate minor differences between familiar and unfamiliar practices, and the influence artworld precedents exert over expert and folk concepts alike. These considerations, I argue, mandate an epistemic humility that is simply unavailable to the concept-descriptivist. (shrink)

The Realist that investigates questions of ontology by appeal to the quantificational structure of language assumes that the semantics for the privileged language of ontology is externalist. I argue that such a language cannot be (some variant of) a natural language, as some Realists propose. The flexibility exhibited by natural language expressions noted by Chomsky and others cannot obviously be characterized by the rigid models available to the externalist. If natural languages are hostile to externalist treatments, then the meanings of (...) natural language expressions serve as poor guides for ontological investigation, insofar as their meanings will fail to determine the referents of their constituents. This undermines the Realist’s use of natural languages to settle disputes in metaphysics. (shrink)

The beliefs of economists are not solely determined by empirical evidence in direct relation to the theories and models they hold. Economists hold 'ontological presuppositions', fundamental ideas about the nature of being which direct their thinking about economic behaviour. In this volume, leading philosophers and economists examine these hidden presuppositions, searching for a 'world view' of economics. What properties are attributed to human individuals in economic theories, and which are excluded? Does economic man exist? Do markets have an essence? Do (...) macroeconomic aggregates exist? Is the economy a mechanism, the functioning of which is governed by a limited set of distinct causes? What are the methodological implications of different ontological starting points? This collection, which establishes economic ontology as a coordinated field of study, will be of great value to economists and philosophers of social sciences. (shrink)

Today, in any mature information society, we live neither online nor offline but on life, that is, we increasingly live in that special space that is both analogue and digital, both online and offline. Imagine someone asking whether the water is fresh or salty in the estuary where the river meets the sea. That someone has not understood the special nature of the place. Our information society is that place. And our technologies are perfectly evolved to take advantage of it, (...) like mangroves growing in brackish water. In the mangrove society, machine-readable data, new forms of agency and interactions are constantly evolving. The consequences of such a radical transformation are many, but one is particularly significant and rich in consequences: how should we design the mangrove society, when it comes to the relationship between the natural and the digital? In this text, I argue that the digital blue is a great ally of the environmental green. The two work best in tandem. And if the world will enjoy a sustainable development for the environment that is also socially preferable for humanity, it will be because the green and the blue will have created a virtuous circle of nature and technology. It can be done. There is just no time to waste. (shrink)

Two major lines of argument support the notion that Hildegard of Bingen’s metaphysics is peculiarly gynocentric. Contra the standard commentary on her work, the focus is not on the notion of viriditas; rather, the first line of argument presents a specific delineation of her ontology, demonstrating that it is a graded hierarchy of beings, many of which present feminine aspects of the divine, and all of which establish the metaphysical notion of interpenetrability. The second line of argument specifically contrasts her (...) thought to that of Aquinas and Meister Eckhart, noting areas of similarity and difference. It is concluded that the visionary origins of Hildegard’s work may have to some extent precluded our understanding of it, and that her work merits consideration not only philosophically and theologically but from the standpoint of its early presentation of a gynocentric worldview. (shrink)

There are prominent resemblances between issues addressed by Simone de Beauvoir in her early essay on moral philosophy, Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944), and issues attracting the attention of contemporary feminist ethicists, especially those concerned with the ethics of care. They include a focus on relationships, interaction, and mutual dependency. Both emphasize concrete ethical challenges rooted in everyday life, such as those affecting parents and children. Both are critical of the level of abstraction and insensitivity to the situation of the moral (...) agent in utilitarianism and Kantian ethics. And both condemn the “moral point of view,” i.e. the assumption that it is possible to speak with a universal voice on behalf of humanity. These resemblances are explored in this article. (shrink)

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 rather straightforward affair: the person wearing the hat or shirt possesses the shirt or the hat. But what is possession in the case of land? This essay seeks to provide an answer to this question in the form of an ontology of landed property. (shrink)

The Unified Medical Language System and the Gene Ontology are among the most widely used terminology resources in the biomedical domain. However, when we evaluate them in the light of simple principles for wellconstructed ontologies we find a number of characteristic inadequacies. Employing the theory of granular partitions, a new approach to the understanding of ontologies and of the relationships ontologies bear to instances in reality, we provide an application of this theory in relation to an example drawn from the (...) context of the pathophysiology of hypertension. This exercise is designed to demonstrate how, by taking ontological principles into account we can create more realistic biomedical ontologies which will also bring advantages in terms of efficiency and robustness of associated software applications. (shrink)

This article investigates the problem of the identity of the parts of space in Newton’s natural philosophy, as well as the holistic or structuralist nature of Newton’s ontology of space. Additionally, this article relates the lessons reached in this historical and philosophical investigation to analogous debates in contemporary space-time ontology. While previous contributions, by Nerlich, Huggett, and others, have proven to be informative in evaluating Newton’s claims, it will be argued that the underlying goals of Newton’s views have largely eluded (...) prior analysis and that Newton’s approach is similar, and lends support, to several current structuralist trends in the conception of space-time ontology. (shrink)

According to Lowe’s Four-Category Ontology, the general nature of the entities belonging to the four fundamental categories is determined by the basic formal ontological relations (instantiation and characterization) that they bear to other entities. I argue that, in closer analysis, instead of one formal relation of characterization, this category system introduces two, one connecting particulars and another universals. With regard to the characterization relation connecting particulars, it remains an open issue whether it would need further analysis. By contrast, the status (...) of instantiation as an internal relation is comparatively clear. Nevertheless, because of holding by virtue of the essences of particulars, the holding of instantiation between universals and particulars rules out the possibility of kind change and entails that particulars are essentially rigidly dependent on universals. Finally, Lowe’s analysis of necessary exemplification gives us some reasons to suspect that some property universals need not have any instances in order to exist. (shrink)

This essay presents an alternative to contemporary substantivalist and relationist interpretations of quantum gravity hypotheses by means of an historical comparison with the ontology of space in the seventeenth century. Utilizing differences in the spatial geometry between the foundational theory and the theory derived from the foundational, in conjunction with nominalism and platonism, it will be argued that there are crucial similarities between seventeenth century and contemporary theories of space, and that these similarities reveal a host of underlying conceptual issues (...) that the substantival/relational dichotomy fails to distinguish. (shrink)

In recent decades, theories of representation have undergone a constructivist turn, as many theorists no longer view the represented subject as prior to but rather as an effect of representation. Whereas some critics have claimed that lacking an ontologically pre-given subject undermines the theory of representation, many democratic theorists have sought to reconceptualize representation and its democratic possibilities by turning away from ontological questions altogether. By focusing instead on how representatives come to know the public interest, many scholars now contend (...) that an epistemological account best explains how political representation can foster democratic participation. Yet, theorists of representation have not assessed whether this turn to epistemology has overcome the ontological problems that initially motivated it. This article tracks epistemological defenses of representation to outline two models of political representation that attempt to tackle the epistemological problem of constituent interest without positing a foundational ontology of the subject. I argue that both theoretical tendencies ultimately remain caught in the problems of ontology, thereby undercutting their normative aspirations to foster political participation. Turning to Hannah Arendt’s comments on public interest and her writings on council democracy, the article retheorizes the concept of political representation to avoid the ontological problems that beset current accounts. (shrink)

Part of a book symposium on Anjan Chakravartty's Scientific ontology: integrating naturalized metaphysics and voluntarist epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2017).

The identity "relation" is misconceived since the syntax of "=" is misconceived as a relative term. Actually, "=" is syncategorematic; it forms (true) sentences with a nonpredicative syntax from pairs of (coreferring) flanking names, much as "&" forms (true) conjunctive sentences from pairs of (true) flanking sentences. In the conaming structure, nothing is predicated of the subject, other than, implicitly, its being so conamed. An identity sentence has both an objectual reading as a necessity about what is named, and also (...) a metalinguistic reading as a contingency about the names. Either way the claim about the subject referent has no extralinguistic content. The necessity of alteridentity (non-self-identity) statements is "lexical", due to contingencies of the names' reference, much like the necessity of analytic statements, due to contingencies of the predicates' sense, and unlike the necessity of logical truths (e.g., self-identities) whose truth is secured by syntax alone. Both alter-identity and analytic sentences are readable as objectual necessities and metalinguistic contingencies. Epistemically, alter-identity statements are not essentially unlike analyticities. "Greece is Hellas"/"g=h" and "Greeks are Hellenes"/"(x)(Gx<=>Hx)" are equally (un)informative; so too for "Azure is cobalt"/"a=c" and "Everything azure is cobalt"/"(x)(Ax<=>Cx)". The real epistemic contrast is between proper names (terms without predicative sense) and terms with a predicative sense (names and predicates of properties). Proper names refer to concrete objects, property names refer to abstract objects. That contrast is metaphysical and thus epistemic. (shrink)

With the present paper I maintain that the group field theory (GFT) approach to quantum gravity can help us clarify and distinguish the problems of spacetime emergence from the questions about the nature of the quanta of space. I will show that the mechanism of phase transition suggests a form of indifference between scales (or phases) and that such an indifference allows us to black-box questions about the nature of the ontology of the fundamental levels of the theory. I consider (...) the GFT approach to quantum gravity which derives spacetime as an emergent property from abstract non-geometrical tetrahedra through a processes of phase transition. Because the physical interpretation of the tetrahedra is problematic in view of their (non)-spatiotemporal nature, I will apply the considerations about phase transitions to GFT and conclude that the fundamental ontology of the theory and the mechanism of spacetime emergence can and should be treated separately. (shrink)

Revised version published as Barry Smith and Achille Varzi, “Fiat and Bona Fide Boundaries”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60: 2 (March 2000), 401–420.

Some philosophers say that in special relativity, four-dimensional stuff is invariant in some sense that three-dimensional stuff is not. I show that this claim is false.

If SNOMED CT is to serve as a biomedical reference terminology, then steps must be taken to ensure comparability of information formulated using successive versions. New releases are therefore shipped with a history mechanism. We assessed the adequacy of this mechanism for its treatment of the distinction between changes occurring on the side of entities in reality and changes in our understanding thereof. We found that these two types are only partially distinguished and that a more detailed study is required (...) to propose clear recommendations for enhancement along at least the following lines: (1) explicit representation of the provenance of a class; (2) separation of the time-period during which a component is stated valid in SNOMED CT from the period it is (or has been) valid in reality, and (3) redesign of the historical relationships table to give users better assistance for recovery in case of introduced mistakes. (shrink)

According to the propositional view of belief, a belief situation involves a believer’s standing in the relation of belief to a proposition. It is argued that the propositional view has unacceptable implications concerning the identity conditions of belief situations involving beliefs with indexical contents, especially where such beliefs are held over a period of time during which background circumstances change. After a critical discussion of Perry’s alternative to the propositional view, a version of the adverbial theory of belief, which accounts (...) satisfactorily for the identity conditions of belief situations, is advanced. This theory, which avoids the standard objections to adverbialism, is defended against the charge that it cannot provide an account of the semantics of sentences attributing the same belief to two or more believers. In the course of this defense it is argued that the standard propositional account of such sentences is insensitive to everyday language. (shrink)

This article clarifies three principles that should guide the development of any cognitive ontology. First, that an adequate cognitive ontology depends essentially on an adequate task ontology; second, that the goal of developing a cognitive ontology is independent of the goal of finding neural implementations of the processes referred to in the ontology; and third, that cognitive ontologies are neutral regarding the metaphysical relationship between cognitive and neural processes.

Charlotte Witt covers a remarkable amount of ground in this concise and elegantly written book. Coming in at under 150 pages, she artfully weaves together Aristotle’s theory of functions with contemporary work on cultural transmission and apprenticeship, ideas about self-creation with theories of aspiration and transformative experience, and reflections on the relationships among social norms and games with thoughts about social roles and the nature of hierarchy. At the heart of it is an elaboration and defense of a thoroughly externalist (...) account of social normativity. Witt takes skilled experts, especially artisans like chefs and carpenters, as paradigm cases for theorizing about social normativity. She uses them to argue that the ultimate source of many normative obligations is found not in the acquiescence, attitudes, or any other features internal to those on whom those obligations fall. Rather, the demands are rooted in the world itself, and flow from specific circumstances, especially from the constraints those circumstances impose on different actors in virtue of the tasks they need to perform. The result is a view that depicts social normativity not just as external to individuals but also unavoidably role specific; what is right for a chef is not necessarily right for a carpenter, and what makes for a good nurse might make for a poor drill sergeant. Witt’s presentation of this package of ideas is both careful and austere, and it makes for a wonderfully thought provoking read. Social Goodness: On the Ontology of Social Norms will reward the careful attention of anyone interested in social ontology, especially the metaphysical foundations of normativity, the nature of social norms, and the relationship between social roles and the self. (shrink)

What follows is an investigation of the ontology of Franz Brentano with special reference to Brentano's later and superficially somewhat peculiar doctrine to the effect that the substances of the material world are three dimensional places. Taken as a whole, Brentano's philosophy is marked by three, not obviously compatible, trait. In the first place, his work is rooted in the metaphysics of Aristotle, above all in Aristotle's substance/accident ontology and in the Aristotelian theory of categories. In the second place, Brentano (...) embraced a Cartesian epistemology. He saw the source of all knowledge as residing in our direct awareness of our own mental phenomena and in our capacity to grasp evident incompatibilities in the realm of concepts.) Thirdly, he regarded the existence of an external world as at most probable, and denied outright the existence of a world similar to the world that is given in experience. Finally, and in some sense linking together these opposing strands, he propagated an idea of what he called "descriptive psychology", a discipline which would on the one hand yield exact knowledge of the structures and categories of mental life, and on the other hand provide an epistemologically sure foundation for other branches of philosophy. As we shall see, it is this psychological aspect of Brentano's philosophy which leads him to his conception of the substantiality of place. Surprisingly, however, the psychological considerations which underlie Brentano's thinking will be shown to raise a series of questions strictly ontological in nature, questions which are not without a systematic interest of their own. (shrink)

Archimedes of Syracuse has long provided a touchstone for considering how we make and acquire knowledge. Since the early Roman chroniclers of Archimedes’ life, and especially intensively since Descartes, scholars have described, sought, or derided the Archimedean point, defining and redefining its epistemic role. “Knowledge,” at least within modernity, is rhetorically tied to the figure of the Archimedean point, a place somewhere outside a regular and constrained world of experience. If this figure still leads to useful ways of thinking about (...) knowing, we are left with the question of how different modes of making knowledge approach their “Archimedean” points. The question is especially important today as a renewed .. (shrink)

The ability to access and share data is key to optimizing and streamlining any industrial production process. Unfortunately, the manufacturing industry is stymied by a lack of interoperability among the systems by which data are produced and managed, and this is true both within and across organizations. In this paper, we describe our work to address this problem through the creation of a suite of modular ontologies representing the product life cycle and its successive phases, from design to end of (...) life. We call this suite the Product Life Cycle (PLC) Ontologies. The suite extends proximately from The Common Core Ontologies (CCO) used widely in defense and intelligence circles, and ultimately from the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), which serves as top level ontology for the CCO and for some 300 further ontologies. The PLC Ontologies were developed together, but they have been factored to cover particular domains such as design, manufacturing processes, and tools. We argue that these ontologies, when used together with standard public domain alignment and browsing tools created within the context of the Semantic Web, may offer a low-cost approach to solving increasingly costly problems of data management in the manufacturing industry. (shrink)

Initially the problems of data integration, for example in the field of medicine, were resolved in case by case fashion. Pairs of databases were cross-calibrated by hand, rather as if one were translating from French into Hebrew. As the numbers and complexity of database systems increased, the idea arose of streamlining these efforts by constructing one single benchmark taxonomy, as it were a central switchboard, into which all of the various classification systems would need to be translated only once. By (...) serving as a lingua franca for database integration this benchmark taxonomy would ensure that all databases calibrated in its terms would be automatically compatible with each other. We describe one strategy for creating such a lingua franca, in which philosophical ontology plays a central role. (shrink)

For much of the first fifty years of its existence, analytic philosophy shunned discussions of normativity and ethics. Ethical statements were considered as pseudo-propositions, or as expressions of pro- or con-attitudes of minor theoretical significance. Nowadays, in contrast, prominent analytic philosophers pay close attention to normative problems. Here we focus our attention on the work of Searle, at the same time drawing out an important connection between Searle’s work and that of two other seminal figures in this development: H.L.A. Hart (...) and John Rawls. We show that all three thinkers tend to assume that there is but one type of normativity within the realm of social institutions – roughly, the sort of normativity that is involved in following the results of chess – and that they thereby neglect features that are of crucial significance for an adequate understanding of social reality. (shrink)