646 found
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  1. (3 other versions)Truth-Makers.Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons & Barry Smith - 1984 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 44 (3):287-321.
    A realist theory of truth for a class of sentences holds that there are entities in virtue of which these sentences are true or false. We call such entities ‘truthmakers’ and contend that those for a wide range of sentences about the real world are moments (dependent particulars). Since moments are unfamiliar, we provide a definition and a brief philosophical history, anchoring them in our ontology by showing that they are objects of perception. The core of our theory is the (...)
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  2. Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology.Robert Arp, Barry Smith & Andrew D. Spear - 2015 - Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    In the era of “big data,” science is increasingly information driven, and the potential for computers to store, manage, and integrate massive amounts of data has given rise to such new disciplinary fields as biomedical informatics. Applied ontology offers a strategy for the organization of scientific information in computer-tractable form, drawing on concepts not only from computer and information science but also from linguistics, logic, and philosophy. This book provides an introduction to the field of applied ontology that is of (...)
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  3. Rationality in Action: A Symposium.Barry Smith - 2001 - Philosophical Explorations 4 (2):66-94.
    Searle’s tool for understanding culture, law and society is the opposition between brute reality and institutional reality, or in other words between: observer-independent features of the world, such as force, mass and gravitational attraction, and observer-relative features of the world, such as money, property, marriage and government. The question posed here is: under which of these two headings do moral concepts fall? This is an important question because there are moral facts – for example pertaining to guilt and responsibility – (...)
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  4. Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology.Barry Smith (ed.) - 1982 - Philosophia Verlag.
    A collection of material on Husserl's Logical Investigations, and specifically on Husserl's formal theory of parts, wholes and dependence and its influence in ontology, logic and psychology. Includes translations of classic works by Adolf Reinach and Eugenie Ginsberg, as well as original contributions by Wolfgang Künne, Kevin Mulligan, Gilbert Null, Barry Smith, Peter M. Simons, Roger A. Simons and Dallas Willard. Documents work on Husserl's ontology arising out of early meetings of the Seminar for Austro-German Philosophy.
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  5. Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano.Barry Smith - 1994 - Chicago: Open Court.
    This book is a survey of the most important developments in Austrian philosophy in its classical period from the 1870s to the Anschluss in 1938. Thus it is intended as a contribution to the history of philosophy. But I hope that it will be seen also as a contribution to philosophy in its own right as an attempt to philosophize in the spirit of those, above all Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Haller, Kevin Mulligan and Peter Simons, who have done so much (...)
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  6. Making AI Meaningful Again.Jobst Landgrebe & Barry Smith - 2021 - Synthese 198 (March):2061-2081.
    Artificial intelligence (AI) research enjoyed an initial period of enthusiasm in the 1970s and 80s. But this enthusiasm was tempered by a long interlude of frustration when genuinely useful AI applications failed to be forthcoming. Today, we are experiencing once again a period of enthusiasm, fired above all by the successes of the technology of deep neural networks or deep machine learning. In this paper we draw attention to what we take to be serious problems underlying current views of artificial (...)
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  7. Fiat and Bona Fide Boundaries.Barry Smith & Achille C. Varzi - 2000 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (2):401-420.
    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 (...)
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  8. Sixteen days.Barry Smith & Berit Brogaard - 2003 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 28 (1):45 – 78.
    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 (...)
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  9. Ontological realism: A methodology for coordinated evolution of scientific ontologies.Barry Smith & Werner Ceusters - 2010 - Applied ontology 5 (3):139-188.
    Since 2002 we have been testing and refining a methodology for ontology development that is now being used by multiple groups of researchers in different life science domains. Gary Merrill, in a recent paper in this journal, describes some of the reasons why this methodology has been found attractive by researchers in the biological and biomedical sciences. At the same time he assails the methodology on philosophical grounds, focusing specifically on our recommendation that ontologies developed for scientific purposes should be (...)
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  10. The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations.Anita Bandrowski, Ryan Brinkman, Mathias Brochhausen, Matthew H. Brush, Bill Bug, Marcus C. Chibucos, Kevin Clancy, Mélanie Courtot, Dirk Derom, Michel Dumontier, Liju Fan, Jennifer Fostel, Gilberto Fragoso, Frank Gibson, Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran, Melissa A. Haendel, Yongqun He, Mervi Heiskanen, Tina Hernandez-Boussard, Mark Jensen, Yu Lin, Allyson L. Lister, Phillip Lord, James Malone, Elisabetta Manduchi, Monnie McGee, Norman Morrison, James A. Overton, Helen Parkinson, Bjoern Peters, Philippe Rocca-Serra, Alan Ruttenberg, Susanna-Assunta Sansone, Richard H. Scheuermann, Daniel Schober, Barry Smith, Larisa N. Soldatova, Christian J. Stoeckert, Chris F. Taylor, Carlo Torniai, Jessica A. Turner, Randi Vita, Patricia L. Whetzel & Jie Zheng - 2016 - PLoS ONE 11 (4):e0154556.
    The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...)
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  11. Relations in Biomedical Ontologies.Barry Smith, Werner Ceusters, Bert Klagges, Jacob Köhler, Anand Kuma, Jane Lomax, Chris Mungall, , Fabian Neuhaus, Alan Rector & Cornelius Rosse - 2005 - Genome Biology 6 (5):R46.
    To enhance the treatment of relations in biomedical ontologies we advance a methodology for providing consistent and unambiguous formal definitions of the relational expressions used in such ontologies in a way designed to assist developers and users in avoiding errors in coding and annotation. The resulting Relation Ontology can promote interoperability of ontologies and support new types of automated reasoning about the spatial and temporal dimensions of biological and medical phenomena.
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  12. (1 other version)The Chemical Senses.Barry C. Smith - 2015 - In Mohan Matthen (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception. New York, NY: Oxford University Press UK. pp. 314-353.
    Long-standing neglect of the chemical senses in the philosophy of perception is due, mostly, to their being regarded as ‘lower’ senses. Smell, taste, and chemically irritated touch are thought to produce mere bodily sensations. However, empirically informed theories of perception can show how these senses lead to perception of objective properties, and why they cannot be treated as special cases of perception modelled on vision. The senses of taste, touch, and smell also combine to create unified perceptions of flavour. The (...)
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  13. Spinoza’s Strong Eudaimonism.Brandon Smith - 2023 - Journal of Modern Philosophy 5 (3):1-21.
    In this paper I defend an eudaimonistic reading of Spinoza’s ethical philosophy. Eudaimonism refers to the mainstream ethical tradition of the ancient Greeks, which considers happiness a naturalistic, stable, and exclusively intrinsic good. Within this tradition, we can also draw a distinction between weak eudaimonists and strong eudaimonists. Weak eudaimonists do not ground their ethical conceptions of happiness in complete theories of metaphysics, epistemology, or psychology. Strong eudaimonists, conversely, build their conceptions of happiness around an overall philosophical system that extends (...)
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  14. On Luck, Responsibility and the Meaning of Life.Berit Brogaard & Barry Smith - 2005 - Philosophical Papers 34 (3):443-458.
    A meaningful life, we shall argue, is a life upon which a certain sort of valuable pattern has been imposed by the person in question - a pattern which involves in serious ways the person having an effect upon the world. Meaningfulness is thus a special kind of value which a human life can bear. Two interrelated difficulties face ths proposal. One concerns responsiblity: how are we to account for the fact that a life that satisfies the above criteria can (...)
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  15. Functions in Basic Formal Ontology.Andrew D. Spear, Werner Ceusters & Barry Smith - 2016 - Applied ontology 11 (2):103-128.
    The notion of function is indispensable to our understanding of distinctions such as that between being broken and being in working order (for artifacts) and between being diseased and being healthy (for organisms). A clear account of the ontology of functions and functioning is thus an important desideratum for any top-level ontology intended for application to domains such as engineering or medicine. The benefit of using top-level ontologies in applied ontology can only be realized when each of the categories identified (...)
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  16. The Construction of Social Reality: An Exchange.Barry Smith & John Searle - 2003 - American Journal of Economics and Sociology 62 (2):285-309.
    Part 1 of this exchange consists in a critique by Smith of Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality focusing on Searle’s use of the formula ‘X counts as Y in context C’. Smith argues that this formula works well for social objects such as dollar bills and presidents where the corresponding X terms (pieces of paper, human beings) are easy to identify. In cases such as debts and prices and money in a bank's computers, however, the formula fails, because these (...)
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  17. Truthmaker realism.Barry Smith - 1999 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 77 (3):274 – 291.
    We take as our starting point a thesis to the effect that, at least for true judgments of many varieties, there are parts of reality which make such judgments are true. We argue that two distinct components are involved in this truthmaker relation. On the one hand is the relation of necessitation, which holds between an object x and a judgment p when the existence of x entails the truth of p. On the other hand is the dual notion of (...)
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  18. Beyond concepts: Ontology as reality representation.Barry Smith - 2001 - In Barry Smith & Christopher Welty (eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS). ACM Press. pp. 1-12.
    The present essay is devoted to the application of ontology in support of research in the natural sciences. It defends the thesis that ontologies developed for such purposes should be understood as having as their subject matter, not concepts, but rather the universals and particulars which exist in reality and are captured in scientific laws. We outline the benefits of a view along these lines by showing how it yields rigorous formal definitions of the foundational relations used in many influential (...)
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  19. The birth of ontology.Barry Smith - 2022 - Journal of Knowledge Structures and Systems 3 (1):57-66.
    This review focuses on the Ogdoas scholastica by Jacob Lorhard, published in 1606. The importance of this document turns on the fact that it contains what is almost certainly the first published occurrence of the term “ontology.” The body of the work consists in a series of diagrams called “diagraphs.” Relevant features of this compendium of diagraphs are: 1. that it does not in fact contain the word “ontology,” and 2. that Lorhard himself was not responsible for its content.
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  20. On drawing lines on a map.Barry Smith - 1995 - In Frank A. U., Kuhn W. & Mark D. M. (eds.), Spatial Information Theory: Proceedings of COSIT '95. Springer. pp. 475-484.
    The paper is an exercise in descriptive ontology, with specific applications to problems in the geographical sphere. It presents a general typology of spatial boundaries, based in particular on an opposition between bona fide or physical boundaries on the one hand, and fiat or human-demarcation-induced boundaries on the other. Cross-cutting this opposition are further oppositions in the realm of boundaries, for example between: crisp and indeterminate, complete and incomplete, enduring and transient, symmetrical and asymmetrical. The resulting typology generates a corresponding (...)
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  21. Why Machines Will Never Rule the World: Artificial Intelligence without Fear.Jobst Landgrebe & Barry Smith - 2022 - Abingdon, England: Routledge.
    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 (...)
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  22. A Theory of Granular Partitions.Thomas Bittner & Barry Smith - 2003 - In Matt Duckham, Michael F. Goodchild & Michael Worboys (eds.), Foundations of Geographic Information Science. London: Taylor & Francis. pp. 117-151.
    We have a variety of different ways of dividing up, classifying, mapping, sorting and listing the objects in reality. The theory of granular partitions presented here seeks to provide a general and unified basis for understanding such phenomena in formal terms that is more realistic than existing alternatives. Our theory has two orthogonal parts: the first is a theory of classification; it provides an account of partitions as cells and subcells; the second is a theory of reference or intentionality; it (...)
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  23. Framework for formal ontology.Barry Smith & Kevin Mulligan - 1983 - Topoi 2 (1):73-85.
    The discussions which follow rest on a distinction, first expounded by Husserl, between formal logic and formal ontology. The former concerns itself with (formal) meaning-structures; the latter with formal structures amongst objects and their parts. The paper attempts to show how, when formal ontological considerations are brought into play, contemporary extensionalist theories of part and whole, and above all the mereology of Leniewski, can be generalised to embrace not only relations between concrete objects and object-pieces, but also relations between what (...)
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  24. (1 other version)Fiat objects.Barry Smith - 1994 - In Nicola Guarino, Laure Vieu & Simone Pribbenow (eds.), Parts and Wholes: Conceptual Part-Whole Relations and Formal Mereology, 11th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Amsterdam, 8 August 1994, Amsterdam:. European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence. pp. 14-22.
    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. (...)
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  25. Mereotopology: A theory of parts and boundaries.Barry Smith - 1996 - Data and Knowledge Engineering 20 (3):287–303.
    The paper is a contribution to formal ontology. It seeks to use topological means in order to derive ontological laws pertaining to the boundaries and interiors of wholes, to relations of contact and connectedness, to the concepts of surface, point, neighbourhood, and so on. The basis of the theory is mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, a theory which is shown to have a number of advantages, for ontological purposes, over standard treatments of topology in set-theoretic terms. One (...)
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  26. Pieces of a Theory.Barry Smith & Kevin Mulligan - 1982 - In Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology. Philosophia Verlag. pp. 15-109.
    A survey of theories of part, whole and dependence from Aristotle to the Gestalt psychologists, with special attention to Husserl’s Third Logical Investigation “On the Theory of Parts and Wholes”.
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  27. (1 other version)Franz Brentano on the Ontology of Mind.Kevin Mulligan & Barry Smith - 1985 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45 (4):627-644.
    This is a review article on Franz Brentano’s Descriptive Psychology published in 1982. We provide a detailed exposition of Brentano’s work on this topic, focusing on the unity of consciousness, the modes of connection and the types of part, including separable parts, distinctive parts, logical parts and what Brentano calls modificational quasi-parts. We also deal with Brentano’s account of the objects of sensation and the experience of time.
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  28. Aboutness: Towards Foundations for the Information Artifact Ontology.Werner Ceusters & Barry Smith - 2015 - In Werner Ceusters & Barry Smith (eds.), Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Biomedical Ontology (ICBO). CEUR vol. 1515. pp. 1-5.
    The Information Artifact Ontology (IAO) was created to serve as a domain‐neutral resource for the representation of types of information content entities (ICEs) such as documents, data‐bases, and digital im‐ages. We identify a series of problems with the current version of the IAO and suggest solutions designed to advance our understanding of the relations between ICEs and associated cognitive representations in the minds of human subjects. This requires embedding IAO in a larger framework of ontologies, including most importantly the Mental (...)
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  29. Against Fantology.Barry Smith - 2005 - In Johann C. Marek Maria E. Reicher (ed.), Experience and Analysis. HPT&ÖBV. pp. 153-170.
    The analytical philosophy of the last hundred years has been heavily influenced by a doctrine to the effect that the key to the correct understanding of reality is captured syntactically in the ‘Fa’ (or, in more sophisticated versions, in the ‘Rab’) of standard first order predicate logic. Here ‘F’ stands for what is general in reality and ‘a’ for what is individual. Hence “f(a)ntology”. Because predicate logic has exactly two syntactically different kinds of referring expressions—‘F’, ‘G’, ‘R’, etc., and ‘a’, (...)
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  30. Sämtliche Werke: Textkritische Ausgabe in 2 Bänden.Adolf Reinach, Karl Schuhmann & Barry Smith - 1989 - Munich: Philosophia.
    The last decade has witnessed the beginnings of a remarkable convergence of Husserlian phenonenology and analytic philosophy of language, and the present volumes provide original and important texts of the phenomenological philosophy of language. Powerfully influenced by the writings of the early Husserl, Reinach fashioned Husserl’s ideas into a rigorous analytical methodology of his own, which he applied in particular to problems in logic and the theory of knowledge, and to the philosophies of law and psychology. The central role of (...)
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  31. Foundations of Gestalt Theory.Barry Smith (ed.) - 1988 - Philosophia.
    In 1890 Christian von Ehrenfels published his classic paper "Über 'Gestaltqualitäten'", the first systematic investigation of the philosophy and psychology of Gestalt. Ehrenfels thereby issued an important challenge to the psychological atomism that was still predominant in his day. His paper not only exerted a powerful influence on the philosophy of the Meinong school, it also marked the beginning of the Gestalt tradition in psychology, later associated with the work of Wertheimer, Köhler and Koffka in Berlin. Includes papers by C. (...)
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  32. SNAP and SPAN: Towards dynamic spatial ontology.Pierre Grenon & Barry Smith - 2004 - Spatial Cognition and Computation 4 (1):69–103.
    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 (...)
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  33. Function, role and disposition in Basic Formal Ontology.Robert Arp & Barry Smith - 2008 - Proceedings of Bio-Ontologies Workshop, Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), Toronto.
    Numerous research groups are now utilizing Basic Formal Ontology as an upper-level framework to assist in the organization and integration of biomedical information. This paper provides elucidation of the three existing BFO subcategories of realizable entity, namely function, role, and disposition. It proposes one further sub-category of tendency, and considers the merits of recognizing two sub-categories of function for domain ontologies, namely, artifactual and biological function. The motivation is to help advance the coherent ontological treatment of functions, roles, and dispositions, (...)
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  34. A unified theory of truth and reference.Barry Smith & Berit Brogaard - 2000 - Logique Et Analyse 43 (169-170):49–93.
    The truthmaker theory rests on the thesis that the link between a true judgment and that in the world to which it corresponds is not a one-to-one but rather a one-to-many relation. An analogous thesis in relation to the link between a singular term and that in the world to which it refers is already widely accepted. This is the thesis to the effect that singular reference is marked by vagueness of a sort that is best understood in supervaluationist terms. (...)
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  35. Document Acts.Barry Smith - 2013 - In Anita Konzelmann Ziv & Hans Bernhard Schmid (eds.), Institutions, Emotions, and Group Agents. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 19-31.
    The theory of document acts is an extension of the more traditional theory of speech acts advanced by Austin and Searle. It is designed to do justice to the ways in which documents can be used to bring about a variety of effects in virtue of the fact that, where speech is evanescent, documents are continuant entities. This means that documents can be preserved in such a way that they can be inspected and modified at successive points in time and (...)
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  36. Guidelines for writing definitions in ontologies.Selja Seppälä, Alan Ruttenberg & Barry Smith - 2017 - Ciência da Informação 46 (1): 73-88.
    Ontologies are being used increasingly to promote the reusability of scientific information by allowing heterogeneous data to be integrated under a common, normalized representation. Definitions play a central role in the use of ontologies both by humans and by computers. Textual definitions allow ontologists and data curators to understand the intended meaning of ontology terms and to use these terms in a consistent fashion across contexts. Logical definitions allow machines to check the integrity of ontologies and reason over data annotated (...)
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  37. Introduction.Barry Smith & David Woodruff Smith - 1995 - In Barry Smith & David Woodruff Smith (eds.), The Cambridge companion to Husserl. New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Husserl’s philosophy, by the usual account, evolved through three stages: 1. development of an anti-psychologistic, objective foundation of logic and mathematics, rooted in Brentanian descriptive psychology; 2. development of a new discipline of "phenomenology" founded on a metaphysical position dubbed "transcendental idealism"; transformation of phenomenology from a form of methodological solipsism into a phenomenology of intersubjectivity and ultimately (in his Crisis of 1936) into an ontology of the life-world, embracing the social worlds of culture and history. We show that this (...)
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  38. A relational theory of the act.Kevin Mulligan & Barry Smith - 1986 - Topoi 5 (2):115-130.
    ‘What is characteristic of every mental activity’, according to Brentano, is ‘the reference to something as an object. In this respect every mental activity seems to be something relational.’ But what sort of a relation, if any, is our cognitive access to the world? This question – which we shall call Brentano’s question – throws a new light on many of the traditional problems of epistemology. The paper defends a view of perceptual acts as real relations of a subject to (...)
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  39. On the application of formal principles to life science data: A case study in the Gene Ontology.Jacob Köhler, Anand Kumar & Barry Smith - 2004 - In Köhler Jacob, Kumar Anand & Smith Barry (eds.), Proceedings of DILS 2004 (Data Integration in the Life Sciences), (Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics 2994). Springer. pp. 79-94.
    Formal principles governing best practices in classification and definition have for too long been neglected in the construction of biomedical ontologies, in ways which have important negative consequences for data integration and ontology alignment. We argue that the use of such principles in ontology construction can serve as a valuable tool in error-detection and also in supporting reliable manual curation. We argue also that such principles are a prerequisite for the successful application of advanced data integration techniques such as ontology-based (...)
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  40. Toward an Ontological Treatment of Disease and Diagnosis.Richard H. Scheuermann, Werner Ceusters & Barry Smith - 2009 - In Richard H. Scheuermann, Werner Ceusters & Barry Smith (eds.), Toward an Ontological Treatment of Disease and Diagnosis. American Medical Informatics Association.
    Many existing biomedical vocabulary standards rest on incomplete, inconsistent or confused accounts of basic terms pertaining to diseases, diagnoses, and clinical phenotypes. Here we outline what we believe to be a logically and biologically coherent framework for the representation of such entities and of the relations between them. We defend a view of disease as involving in every case some physical basis within the organism that bears a disposition toward the execution of pathological processes. We present our view in the (...)
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  41. The niche.Barry Smith & Achille C. Varzi - 1999 - Noûs 33 (2):214-238.
    The concept of niche (setting, context, habitat, environment) has been little studied by ontologists, in spite of its wide application in a variety of disciplines from evolutionary biology to economics. What follows is a first formal theory of this concept, a theory of the relations between objects and their niches. The theory builds upon existing work on mereology, topology, and the theory of spatial location as tools of formal ontology. It will be illustrated above all by means of simple biological (...)
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  42. (1 other version)Classifying Processes: An Essay in Applied Ontology.Barry Smith - 2012 - Ratio 25 (4):463-488.
    We begin by describing recent developments in the burgeoning discipline of applied ontology, focusing especially on the ways ontologies are providing a means for the consistent representation of scientific data. We then introduce Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), a top-level ontology that is serving as domain-neutral framework for the development of lower level ontologies in many specialist disciplines, above all in biology and medicine. BFO is a bicategorial ontology, embracing both three-dimensionalist (continuant) and four-dimensionalist (occurrent) perspectives within a single framework. We (...)
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  43. Gestalt theory: An essay in philosophy.Barry Smith - 1988 - In Foundations of Gestalt Theory. Philosophia. pp. 11-81.
    The Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels published his essay "On 'Gestalt Qualities'" in 1890. The essay initiated a current of thought which enjoyed a powerful position in the philosophy and psychology of the first half of this century and has more recently enjoyed a minor resurgence of interest in the area of cognitive science, above all in criticisms of the so-called 'strong programme' in artificial intelligence. The theory of Gestalt is of course associated most specifically with psychologists of the Berlin (...)
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  44. On substances, accidents and universals: In defence of a constituent ontology.Barry Smith - 1997 - Philosophical Papers 26 (1):105-127.
    The essay constructs an ontological theory designed to capture the categories instantiated in those portions or levels of reality which are captured in our common sense conceptual scheme. It takes as its starting point an Aristotelian ontology of “substances” and “accidents”, which are treated via the instruments of mereology and topology. The theory recognizes not only individual parts of substances and accidents, including the internal and external boundaries of these, but also universal parts, such as the “humanity” which is an (...)
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  45. Quantum mereotopology.Barry Smith & Berit O. Brogaard - 2002 - Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence 36 (1):153-175.
    Mereotopology faces problems when its methods are extended to deal with time and change. We offer a new solution to these problems, based on a theory of partitions of reality which allows us to simulate (and also to generalize) aspects of set theory within a mereotopological framework. This theory is extended to a theory of coarse- and fine-grained histories (or finite sequences of partitions evolving over time), drawing on machinery developed within the framework of the so-called ‘consistent histories’ interpretation of (...)
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  46. Biomedical Ontologies.Barry Smith - 2022 - In Peter L. Elkin (ed.), Terminology, Ontology and Their Implementations: Teaching Guide and Notes. Springer. pp. 125-169.
    We begin at the beginning, with an outline of Aristotle’s views on ontology and with a discussion of the influence of these views on Linnaeus. We move from there to consider the data standardization initiatives launched in the 19th century, and then turn to investigate how the idea of computational ontologies developed in the AI and knowledge representation communities in the closing decades of the 20th century. We show how aspects of this idea, particularly those relating to the use of (...)
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  47. Logic, Form and Matter.Barry Smith & David Murray - 1981 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 55 (1):47 - 74.
    It is argued, on the basis of ideas derived from Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Husserl's Logical Investigations, that the formal comprehends more than the logical. More specifically: that there exist certain formal-ontological constants (part, whole, overlapping, etc.) which do not fall within the province of logic. A two-dimensional directly depicting language is developed for the representation of the constants of formal ontology, and means are provided for the extension of this language to enable the representation of certain materially necessary relations. The (...)
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  48. Characteristica Universalis.Barry Smith - 1991 - In Kevin Mulligan (ed.), Language, Truth and Ontology. Dordrecht, Netherland: Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 48--77.
    Recent work in formal philosophy has concentrated over-whelmingly on the logical problems pertaining to epistemic shortfall - which is to say on the various ways in which partial and sometimes incorrect information may be stored and processed. A directly depicting language, in contrast, would reflect a condition of epistemic perfection. It would enable us to construct representations not of our knowledge but of the structures of reality itself, in much the way that chemical diagrams allow the representation (at a certain (...)
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  49. The Space Object Ontology.Alexander P. Cox, Christopher Nebelecky, Ronald Rudnicki, William Tagliaferri, John L. Crassidis & Barry Smith - 2016 - In Alexander P. Cox, Christopher Nebelecky, Ronald Rudnicki, William Tagliaferri, John L. Crassidis & Barry Smith (eds.), 19th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION 2016). IEEE.
    Achieving space domain awareness requires the identification, characterization, and tracking of space objects. Storing and leveraging associated space object data for purposes such as hostile threat assessment, object identification, and collision prediction and avoidance present further challenges. Space objects are characterized according to a variety of parameters including their identifiers, design specifications, components, subsystems, capabilities, vulnerabilities, origins, missions, orbital elements, patterns of life, processes, operational statuses, and associated persons, organizations, or nations. The Space Object Ontology provides a consensus-based realist framework (...)
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  50. How to Do Things with Documents.Barry Smith - 2012 - Rivista di Estetica 50:179-198.
    This essay is a contribution to social ontology, drawing on the work of John Searle and of Hernando de Soto. At the center of the argument is the proposition advanced by de Soto in his Mystery of Capital to the effect that many of the entities which structure our contemporary social reality are entities which exist in virtue of the fact that there are (paper or digital) documents which support their existence. I here develop de Soto’s argument further, focusing specifically (...)
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