Of Chisholm’s many signal contributions to analytic metaphysics, perhaps the most important is his treatment of boundaries, a category of entity that has been neglected, to say the least, in the history of ontology. We can gain some preliminary idea of the sorts of problems which the Chisholmian ontology of boundaries is designed to solve, if we consider the following Zeno-inspired thought-experiment.

I shall attempt in what follows to show how mereology, taken together with certain topological notions, can yield the basis for future investigations in formal ontology. I shall attempt to show also how the mereological framework here advanced can allow the direct and natural formulation of a series of theses – for example pertaining to the concept of boundary – which can be formulated only indirectly (if at all) in set-theoretic terms.

Ontologies and standards are strongly interrelated and can often be seen as two sides of the same coin. Indeed, standards reflect consensus on the semantics of terms, though different standards might employ different ways to explain the same or very similar concepts semantically. Given the crucial role played by both aspects in OntoCommons, we have interviewed Barry Smith, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo and one of the External Advisory Board (EAB) members of the OntoCommons (...) project, to better understand what are the challenges and priorities to focus on in this context. (shrink)

This book explores the nature of moral responsibilities of affluent individuals in the developed world, addressing global poverty and arguments that philosophers have offered for having these responsibilities. The first type of argument grounds responsibilities in the ability to avert serious suffering by taking on some cost. The second argument seeks to ground responsibilities in the fact that the affluent are contributing to such poverty. The authors criticise many of the claims advanced by those who seek to ground stringent responsibilities (...) to the poor by invoking these two types of arguments. It does not follow from this that the affluent are meeting responsibilities to the poor. The book argues that while people are not ordinarily required to make large sacrifices in assisting others in severe need, they are required to incur moderate costs to do so. If the affluent fail consistently to meet standards, this fact can substantially increase the costs they are required to bear in order to address it. (shrink)

We have now reached the point at which cloud computing and other types of advanced infrastructure are bringing about a situation in which knowledge objects can be delivered in an efficient manner to hose who need to consume them. And just as highways were the infrastructure necessary for a manufacturing economy, serving as the arteries along which raw materials and manufactured goods coming in from all directions could flow, so we believe that ontologies will in the future provide an important (...) pillar in the infrastructure that is necessary for the accurate and safe delivery of all varieties of knowledge. (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)

While contemporary philosophers have devoted vast amounts of attention to the language we use in describing and finding our way about the world of everyday experience, they have, with few exceptions, refused to see this world itself as a fitting object of theoretical concern. In what follows I shall seek to show how the commonsensical world might be treated ontologically as an object of investigation in its own right. At the same time I shall seek to establish how such a (...) treatment might help us better philosophically to understand the structures of both physical reality and cognition. (shrink)

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.

Increasingly, in data-intensive areas of the life sciences, experimental results are being described in algorithmically useful ways with the help of ontologies. Such ontologies are authored and maintained by scientists to support the retrieval, integration and analysis of their data. The proposition to be defended here is that ontologies of this type – the Gene Ontology (GO) being the most conspicuous example – are a part of science. Initial evidence for the truth of this proposition (which some will find self-evident) (...) is the increasing recognition of the importance of empirically-based methods of evaluation to the ontology development work being undertaken in support of scientific research. Ontologies created by scientists must, of course, be associated with implementations satisfying the requirements of software engineering. But the ontologies are not themselves engineering artifacts, and to conceive them as such brings grievous consequences. Rather, ontologies such as the GO are in different respects comparable to scientific theories, to scientific databases, and to scientific journal publications. Such a view implies a new conception of what is involved in the authoring, maintenance and application of ontologies in scientific contexts, and therewith also a new approach to the evaluation of ontologies and to the training of ontologists. (shrink)

The Universal Core (UCore) is a central element of the National Information Sharing Strategy that is supported by multiple U.S. Federal Government Departments, by the intelligence community, and by a number of other national and international institutions. The goal of the UCore initiative is to foster information sharing by means of an XML schema providing consensus representations for four groups of universally understood terms under the headings who, what, when, and where. We here describe a project to create an ontology-based (...) supporting layer for UCore, entitled ‘Universal Core Semantic Layer’ (UCore SL), and describe how UCore SL can be applied to further UCore’s information sharing goals. (shrink)

Despite the prevalence of human rights discourse, the very idea or concept of a human right remains obscure. In particular, it is unclear what is supposed to be special or distinctive about human rights. In this paper, we consider two recent attempts to answer this challenge, James Griffin’s “personhood account” and Charles Beitz’s “practice-based account”, and argue that neither is entirely satisfactory. We then conclude with a suggestion for what a more adequate account might look like – what we call (...) the “structural pluralist account” of human rights. (shrink)

The history of evolution is a history of development from less to more complex organisms. This growth in complexity of organisms goes hand in hand with a concurrent growth in complexity of environments and of organism-environment relations. It is a concern with this latter aspect of evolutionary development that motivates the present paper. We begin by outlining a theory of organism-environment relations. We then show that the theory can be applied to a range of different sorts of cases, both biological (...) and non-biological, in which objects are lodged or housed within specific environments, or niches. Biological science is interested in types—for example in genotypes, phenotypes, and environment types—in regularities that can serve as the basis for the formulation of laws or general principles. Types, however, can exist only through their corresponding tokens. Our theory of token environments is meant to plug this gap and to provide a first step towards a general theory of causally relevant spatial volumes. (shrink)

Kotarbiński is one of the leading figures in the Lvov-Warsaw school of Polish philosophy. We summarize the development of Kotarbiński’s thought from his early nominalism and ‘pansomatistic reism’ to the later doctrine of ‘temporal phases’. We show that the surface clarity and simplicity of Kotarbiński’s writings mask a number of profound philosophical difficulties, connected above all with the problem of giving an adequate account of the truth of contingent (tensed) predications. The paper will examine in particular the attempts to resolve (...) these difficulties on the part of Leśniewski. It will continue with an account of the relations of Kotarbińskian reism to the ontology of things or entia realia defended by the later Brentano. Kotarbiński’s identification of Brentano as a precursor of reism is, it will be suggested, at least questionable, and the paper will conclude with a more careful attempt to situate the Brentanian and Kotarbińskian ontologies within the spectrum of competing ontological views. (shrink)

The world of ontology development is full of mysteries. Recently, ISO Standard 15926 (“Lifecycle Integration of Process Plant Data Including Oil and Gas Production Facilities”), a data model initially designed to support the integration and handover of large engineering artefacts, has been proposed by its principal custodian for general use as an upper level ontology. As we shall discover, ISO 15926 is, when examined in light of this proposal, marked by a series of quite astonishing defects, which may however provide (...) general lessons for the developers of ontologies in the future. (shrink)

It is only by fixing on agreed meanings of terms in biomedical terminologies that we will be in a position to achieve that accumulation and integration of knowledge that is indispensable to progress at the frontiers of biomedicine. Standardly, the goal of fixing meanings is seen as being realized through the alignment of terms on what are called ‘concepts’. Part I addresses three versions of the concept-based approach – by Cimino, by Wüster, and by Campbell and associates – and surveys (...) some of the problems to which they give rise, all of which have to do with a failure to anchor the terms in terminologies to corresponding referents in reality. Part II outlines a new, realist solution to this anchorage problem, which sees terminology construction as being motivated by the goal of alignment not on concepts but on the universals (kinds, types) in reality and thereby also on the corresponding instances (individuals, tokens). We outline the realist approach, and show how on its basis we can provide a benchmark of correctness for terminologies which will at the same time allow a new type of integration of terminologies and electronic health records. We conclude by outlining ways in which the framework thus defined might be exploited for purposes of diagnostic decision-support. (shrink)

The perception of spatial bodies is at least in part a perception of bodily boundaries or surfaces. The usual mathematical conception of boundaries as abstract constructions is, however, of little use for cognitive science purposes. The essay therefore seeks a more adequate conception of the ontology of boundaries building on ideas in Aristotle and Brentano on what we may call the coincidence of boundaries. It presents a formal theory of boundaries and of the continua to which they belong, of a (...) sort which allows a resolution of certain Zeno-style paradoxes. The theory proves to be applicable not only in the cognitive science field but also in regard to problems relating to the ontology of geographical and geopolitical boundaries. (shrink)

While Darwin is commonly supposed to have demonstrated the inapplicability of the Aristotelian ontology of species to biological science, recent developments, especially in the wake of the Human Genome Project, have given rise to a new golden age of classification in which ontological ideas -- as for example in the Gene Ontology, the Cell Ontology, the Protein Ontology, and so forth -- are once again playing an important role. In regard to species, on the other hand, matters are more complex. (...) We provide a brief overview of recent proposals concerning the ontology of species, dealing with species as sets, classes and as collections, the views of Ernst Meyr, and mereological views. (shrink)

In recent years it has often been claimed that policies such as subsidies paid to domestic producers by affluent countries and tariffs on goods produced by foreign producers in poorer countries violate important moral requirements because they do severe harm to poor people, even kill them. Such claims involve an empirical aspect—such policies are on balance very bad for the global poor—and a philosophical aspect—that the causal influence of these policies can fairly be characterized as doing severe harm and killing. (...) In this essay, we examine the philosophical aspect of this issue. We conclude that these policies do not do harm to the poor, but rather enable harm to them in various ways, and explore the moral implications of this fact. (shrink)

This volume brings together a range of influential essays by distinguished philosophers and political theorists on the issue of global justice. Global justice concerns the search for ethical norms that should govern interactions between people, states, corporations and other agents acting in the global arena, as well as the design of social institutions that link them together. The volume includes articles that engage with major theoretical questions such as the applicability of the ideals of social and economic equality to the (...) global sphere, the degree of justified partiality to compatriots, and the nature and extent of the responsibilities of the affluent to address global poverty and other hardships abroad. It also features articles that bring the theoretical insights of global justice thinkers to bear on matters of practical concern to contemporary societies, such policies associated with immigration, international trade, and climate change. -/- Contents: Introduction; Part I Standards of Global Justice: (i) Assistance-Based Responsibilities to the Global Poor: Famine, affluence and mortality, Peter Singer; We don't owe them a thing! A tough-minded but soft-hearted view of aid to the faraway needy, Jan Narveson; Does distance matter morally to the duty to rescue? Frances Myrna Kamm. (ii) Contribution-Based Responsibilities to the Global Poor: 'Assisting' the global poor, Thomas Pogge; Should we stop thinking about poverty in terms of helping the poor?, Alan Patten; Poverty and the moral significance of contribution, Gerhard Øverland. (iii)Cosmopolitans, Global Egalitarians, and its Critics: The one and the many faces of cosmopolitanism, Catherine Lu; Cosmopolitan justice and equalizing opportunities, Simon Caney; The problem of global justice, Thomas Nagel; Against global egalitarianism, David Miller; Egalitarian challenges to global egalitarianism: a critique, Christian Barry and Laura Valentini. Part II Pressing Global Socioeconomic Issues: (i) Governing the Flow of People: Immigration and freedom of association, Christopher Wellman; Democratic theory and border coercion: no right to unilaterally control your own borders, Arash Abizadeh; Justice in migration: a closed borders utopia?, Lea Ypi. (ii) Climate Change: Global environment and international inequality, Henry Shue; Valuing policies in response to climate change: some ethical issues, John Broome; Saved by disaster? Abrupt climate change, political inertia, and the possibility of an intergenerational arms race, Stephen M. Gardiner; Polycentric systems for coping with collective action and global environmental change, Elinor Ostrom. (iii) International Trade: Responsibility and global labor justice, Iris Marion Young; Property rights and the resource curse, Leif Wenar; Fairness in trade I: obligations arising from trading and the pauper-labor argument, Mathias Risse; Name index. -/- See: www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calctitle=1&pageSubject=483&sort=pubdate&forthcoming=1&title_i d=9958&edition_id=13385. (shrink)

This paper applies the ontological framework developed by Roman Ingarden in his Controversy over the Existence of the World to the domain of mathematics, concluding with some remarks on parallels between the mode of existence of mathematical entities on the one hand and of values on the other.

Where some have attempted to apply cognitive methods to the study of geography, the present paper is designed to serve as a starting point for applying methods of geographic ontology to the phenomena of cognition. Agglomerations are aggregates of entities that are dispersed through space on geographic scales. Examples include: plagues, biological species, major world religions. The paper applies standard mereotopological theories of spatial regions to agglomerations in this sense. It offers the beginnings of a general theory of the relations (...) between social, cultural, ethnic and religious agglomerations on the one hand and territorially demarcated spatial objects on the other. In this way it serves as the basis for a general ontological theory of types of human groups and also of types of conflict between these groups. At the same time it provides ontological foundations for the epidemiological study of cognitive phenomena, and especially of cognitive phenomena in the sociopolitical realm. (shrink)

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 (...) nature of these multimodal experiences and the character of our awareness of them puts pressure on the traditional idea that each episode of perception goes one or other of the five senses. Thus, the chemical senses, far from being peripheral to the concerns of the philosophy of perception, may hold important clues to the multisensory nature of perception in general. (shrink)

As is well known, speech acts such as acts of promising can have ontological consequences. For example an act of promising can give rise to a mutually correlated claim and obligation. Increasingly, speech acts in the narrow sense are being augmented by the use of documents of multiple different sorts. In this paper we analyze the results of this augmenta-tion from the ontological point of view, considering especially the domains of law and com-merce. We show how document acts are not (...) isolated phenomena, but rather form large and complex systems with other entities, including occurrent entities such as acts of signing and inspecting, as well as speech acts for example of instructing people to sign or complete a doc-ument. The paper concludes with a consideration of some of the special problems associated with the use of digital documents, for example as concerns issues of security and provenance. (shrink)

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 – (...) which hover uncomfortably close to the boundary between the observer-relative and the observer-independent. By means of a thought experiment involving an imagined Chinese society in which guilt is determined by the random throwing of sticks, I seek to show that moral concepts threaten the foundations of Searle’s philosophy of social reality. (shrink)

The development of ontologies for the purposes of data curation is an important element in modern-day data and information sciences. Unfortunately, much of the work on these applied ontologies is associated with a relativist or conceptualist point of view, according to which ontologies represent (for example) the concepts in the minds of human beings. The paper describes a series of problems with such views, and defends an alternative realist interpretation.

The rapidly increasing wealth of genomic data has driven the development of tools to assist in the task of representing and processing information about genes, their products and their functions. One of the most important of these tools is the Gene Ontology (GO), which is being developed in tandem with work on a variety of bioinformatics databases. An examination of the structure of GO, however, reveals a number of problems, which we believe can be resolved by taking account of certain (...) organizing principles drawn from philosophical ontology. We shall explore the results of applying such principles to GO with a view to improving GO’s consistency and coherence and thus its future applicability in the automated processing of biological data. (shrink)

It is a truism that the attitude of deference to the text plays a lesser role in Anglo-Saxon philosophy than in other philosophical traditions. Works of philosophy written in English have, it is true, spawned a massive secondary literature dealing with the ideas, problems or arguments they contain. But they have almost never given rise to works of commentary in the strict sense, a genre which is however a dominant literary form not only in the Confucian, Vedantic, Islamic, Jewish and (...) Scholastic traditions of the past, but also in relation to more recent German-language philosophy (thus for example in work on Hegel, Heidegger or Wittgenstein). Moreover Anglo-Saxon philosophers have themselves embraced the commentary form when dealing with Greek or Latin philosophers outside their own tradition. The paper seeks to establish the reasons for this imbalance by examining those factors which might be conducive to the growth of a commentary literature in a given culture. (shrink)

How, as Caldwell puts it, does one choose between rival systems all of which claim to rest on a priori foundations? On the nonfallibilistic conception it is difficult to make sense even of the possibility of rival systems of this sort. On the conception here defended, in contrast, the existence of such rival systems can be seen to be a perfectly natural and acceptable consequence of the just-mentioned difficulties we will often fact in coming to know even the intelligible traits (...) of reality: one adjudicates between such systems in the same way in which one adjudicates between all rival scientific hypotheses, namely via a complex mixture of empirical and a priori considerations. (shrink)

Provides a survey of the development of speech act theory from Aristotle through Reid and Peirce to Edmund Husserl, Anton Marty, Johannes Daubert, Adolf Reinach, and finally to Austin and Searle. A special role is played by Husserl's theory of objectifying acts (meaning, roughly, acts of naming or stating) and of the efforts by his followers to extend this theory to cover phenomena such as questioning and commanding. These efforts culminated in the work of Adolf Reinach, who developed the first (...) systematic theory of speech acts in connection with his monograph of 1913 on “The A Priori Foundations of the Civil Law”. (shrink)

Warum hat sich die deutsche Philosophie so sehr und so langanhaltend an Autoritäten und Texte gebunden gefühlt, fast als ob man – wie die alten Iatrophilologen – Wissen aus bloßen Worten herauspressen wollte? Warum haben sich in Deutschland so häufig philosophische Sprachstile entwickelt, die ein Hindernis fur das Verständnis der entsprechenden Texte sind?

Driving licenses, identity cards, passports, boarding passes, credit cards, ATM cards – all of these are examples of credentials. Credentials are documents that play a fundamental role in all modern societies. However, philosophers and social ontologists have not yet addressed the analysis of their nature and function. This paper aims to fill this gap through a review of the essential characteristics of credentials, as documents whose primary purpose is to certify the identity and institutional status of the bearer, for example (...) as being the bearer of specific rights. However, credentials also allow their holders the concrete exercise of their rights, as when exercising a right concretely (e.g., crossing a border) requires the possession of a particular credential. The authors distinguish the different types of credentials and describe their functions and the various kinds of acts that are performable with their aid. (shrink)

We defend a view according to which Austrian economics rests on what can most properly be called an Aristotelian methodology. This implies a realist perspective, according to which the world exists independently of our thinking and reasoning activities; an essentialist perspective, according to which the world contains certain simple essences or natures which may come together in law-like ways to form more complex static and dynamic wholes, and an apriorist perspective, according to which given essences and essential structures are intelligible, (...) in the sense that they ca be grasped non-inductively in our thinking. We show the consequences of this view for an analysis of the thinking of Mises and Hoppe, both of which – we claim – incorporate what we believe to be foreign mixtures of Kantianism in their account of the foundations of Austrian economics. (shrink)

Values exist not in isolation, but in complex wholes. Values are what they are because of the complex wholes in which they are situated. To do justice to this thesis will require a holistic ontology, a theory according to which many types of entities exist only as inseparable parts or moments of wider contexts or environments. An ontological theory of environments -- with roots in Gestalt psychology and the ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson and Roger Barker, and which is (...) related also to the theory of motivation sketched by Edmund Husserl as part of his theory of the lifeworld or Lebenswelt -- will help us to understand the ontology of values. It will help us to understand what values are. It will not, however, tell us what is good or bad. From facts of ontology, no value propositions follow. (shrink)

When philosophers, social scientists, and politicians seek to determine the justice of institutional arrangements, their discussions have often taken the form of questioning whether and under what circumstances the redistribution of wealth or other valuable goods is justified. This essay examines the different ways in which redistribution can be understood, the diverse political contexts in which it has been employed, and whether or not it is a useful concept for exploring questions of distributive justice.

Peer commentary on Herta Nagl-Docekal, “The Feminist Transformation of Philosophy”.

Efficient markets are alienating if they inhibit us from recognizably caring about one another in our productive activities. I argue that efficient market behaviour is both exclusionary and fetishistic. As exclusionary, the efficient marketeer cannot manifest care alongside their market behaviour. As fetishistic, the efficient marketeer cannot manifest care in their market behaviour. The conjunction entails that efficient market behavior inhibits care. It doesn’t follow that efficient market behavior is vicious: individuals might justifiably commit to efficiency because doing so serves (...) the common good. But efficient market systems nevertheless have significant opportunity costs. The discussion yields a range of desiderata for non-alienated economic organization. (shrink)

La lógica es para Husserl una ciencia de la ciencia, una ciencia de lo que todas las ciencias tienen en común respecto de sus modos de validación. De este modo, la lógica trata por un lado con leyes universales relacionadas con la verdad, la deducción, la verificación y la falsación; y, por otro lado, con leyes relacionadas con la teoría como tal, y con lo que produce la unidad teorética. Ambos tipos de leyes se refieren por una parte a las (...) proposiciones de una teoría y por otra parte al dominio de objetos al que esas proposiciones se refieren. Este ensayo presenta una perspectiva sistemática del punto de vista husserliano sobre estos temas tal como él lo expone en sus Investigaciones Lógicas. Se muestra la manera en que su teoría de los significados lingüísticos en tanto especies de actos mentales, su ontología formal de la parte, el todo y la dependencia, su teoría de las categorías significativas, y su teoría de la intuición categorial combinada con su teoría de la ciencia conforman un todo singular. Finalmente, este trabajo explora la forma en que las ideas de Husserl sobre estos temas pueden ser reactivadas para resolver problemas en la filosofía del lenguaje, la lógica y la matemática de un modo que haga justicia al rol de la actividad mental en cada uno de estos dominios, evitando al mismo tiempo caer en los problemas del psicologismo. (shrink)

ABSTRACT We have previously argued that there are forms of greenhouse gas offsetting for which, when one emits and offsets, one imposes no risk. Orri Stefansson objects that our argument fails to distinguish properly between the people who stand to be harmed by one’s emissions and the people who stand to be benefited by one’s offsetting. We reply by emphasizing the difference between acting with a probability of making a difference to the distribution of harm and acting in a way (...) that worsen’s someone’s prospect. (shrink)

An account of Roman Ingarden's ontology of literature.

Autobiography of Barry Smith; emphasizes the role of Dummett and Husserl, Austrian philosophy and economics, and the Munich-Göttingen-Kraków school of realist phenomenology.

The theory of speech acts put forward by Adolf Reinach in his "The A Priori Foundations of the Civil Law" of 1913 rests on a systematic account of the ontological structures associated with various different sorts of language use. One of the most original features of Reinach's account lies in hIs demonstration of how the ontological structure of, say, an action of promising or of commanding, may be modified in different ways, yielding different sorts of non-standard instances of the corresponding (...) speech act varieties. The present paper is an attempt to apply this idea of standard and modified instances of ontological structures to the realm of judgement and cognition, and thereby to develop a Reinachian theory of how intentionality is mediated through language in acts of thinking and speaking. (shrink)

The paper seeks to show how the world of everyday human cognition might be treated as an object of ontological investigation in its own right. The paper is influenced by work on affordances and prototypicality of psychologists such as Gibson and Rosch, by work on cognitive universals of the anthropologist Robin Horton, and by work of Patrick Hayes and others on ‘naive’ or ‘qualitative physics’. It defends a thesis to the effect that there is, at the heart of common sense, (...) a theoretical core of true propositions pertaining to mesoscopic objects, and that the latter are to be understood as relating mereologically to the objects studied by physical science. (shrink)

The paper uses the tools of mereotopology (the theory of parts, wholes and boundaries) to work out the implications of certain analogies between the 'ecological psychology' of J. J Gibson and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. It presents an ontological theory of spatial boundaries and of spatially extended entities. By reference to examples from the geographical sphere it is shown that both boundaries and extended entities fall into two broad categories: those which exist independently of our cognitive acts (for example, (...) the planet Earth, its exterior surface); and those which exist only in virtue of such acts (for example: the equator, the North Sea). The visual field, too, can be conceived as an example of an extended entity that is dependent in the sense at issue. The paper suggests extending this analogy by postulating entities which would stand to true judgments as the visual field stands to acts of visual perception. The judgment field is defined more precisely as that complex extended entity which comprehends all entities which are relevant to the truth of a given (true) judgment. The work of cognitive linguists such as Talmy and Langacker, when properly interpreted, can be shown to yield a detailed account of the structures of the judgment fields corresponding to sentences of different sorts. A new sort of correspondence-theoretic definition of truth for sentences of natural language can then be formulated on this basis. (shrink)

In his latest book, Michael Devitt rejects Chomsky’s mentalist conception of linguistics. The case against Chomsky is based on two principal claims. First, that we can separate the study of linguistic competence from the study of its outputs: only the latter belongs to linguistic inquiry. Second, Chomsky’s account of a speaker’s competence as consisiting in the mental representation of rules of a grammar for his language is mistaken. I shall argue, first, that Devitt fails to make a case for separating (...) the study of outputs from the study of competence, and second, that Devitt mis-characterises Chomsky’s account of competence, and so his objections miss their target. Chomsky’s own views come close to a denial that speaker’s have knowledge of their language. But a satisfactory account of what speakers are able to do will need to ascribe them linguistic knowledge that they use to speak and understand. I shall explore a conception of speaker’s knowledge of language that confirrns Chomsky’s mentalist view of linguistics but which is immune to Devitt’s criticism. (shrink)

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.