Three-dimensionalists , sometimes referred to as endurantists, think that objects persist through time by being “wholly present” at every time they exist. But what is it for something to be wholly present at a time? It is surprisingly difficult to say. The threedimensionalist is free, of course, to take ‘is wholly present at’ as one of her theory’s primitives, but this is problematic for at least one reason: some philosophers claim not to understand her primitive. Clearly the three-dimensionalist would be (...) better off if she could state her theory in terms accessible to all. We think she can. What is needed is a definition of ‘is wholly present at’ that all can understand. in this paper, we offer one. (shrink)

As engineering applications require management of ever larger volumes of data, ontologies offer the potential to capture, manage, and augment data with the capability for automated reasoning and semantic querying. Unfortunately, considerable barriers hinder wider deployment of ontologies in engineering. Key among these is lack of a shared top-level ontology to unify and organise disparate aspects of the field and coordinate co-development of orthogonal ontologies. As a result, many engineering ontologies are limited to their scope, and functionally difficult to extend (...) or interoperate with other engineering ontologies. This paper demonstrates how the use of a top-level ontology, specifically the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), greatly facilitates interoperability of multiple engineering-related ontologies. We constructed a system of formal linked ontologies by re-engineering legacy ontologies to be conformant with BFO and developing new BFO-conformant ontologies to capture knowledge in the engineering design, enterprise, human factors, manufacturing, and application domain of additive manufacturing. The resulting Integrated Framework for Additively Manufactured Products (IFAMP), including the body knowledge instantiated on its basis, serve as the basis for a proposed Design with Additive Manufacturing Method (DWAM), which we believe can support the design of innovative products with semantically enhanced ideation tools and enhanced access to application domain knowledge. The method and its facilitation through the ontological framework are demonstrated using a case study in medicine. (shrink)

In this paper we propose a formal theory of partitions (ways of dividing up or sorting or mapping reality) and we show how the theory can be applied in the geospatial domain. We characterize partitions at two levels: as systems of cells (theory A), and in terms of their projective relation to reality (theory B). We lay down conditions of well-formedness for partitions and we define what it means for partitions to project truly onto reality. We continue by classifying well-formed (...) partitions along three axes: (a) degree of correspondence between partition cells and objects in reality; (b) degree to which a partition represents the mereological structure of the domain it is projected onto; and (c) degree of completeness and exhaustiveness with which a partition represents reality. This classification is used to characterize three types of partitions that play an important role in spatial information science: cadastral partitions, categorical coverages, and the partitions involved in folk categorizations of the geospatial domain. (shrink)

Immunology researchers are beginning to explore the possibilities of reproducibility, reuse and secondary analyses of immunology data. Open-access datasets are being applied in the validation of the methods used in the original studies, leveraging studies for meta-analysis, or generating new hypotheses. To promote these goals, the ImmPort data repository was created for the broader research community to explore the wide spectrum of clinical and basic research data and associated findings. The ImmPort ecosystem consists of four components–Private Data, Shared Data, Data (...) Analysis, and Resources—for data archiving, dissemination, analyses, and reuse. To date, more than 300 studies have been made freely available through the ImmPort Shared Data portal , which allows research data to be repurposed to accelerate the translation of new insights into discoveries. (shrink)

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 (...) provides an account of how cells and subcells relate to objects in reality. We define a notion of well-formedness for partitions, and we give an account of what it means for a partition to project onto objects in reality. We continue by classifying partitions along three axes: (a) in terms of the degree of correspondence between partition cells and objects in reality; (b) in terms of the degree to which a partition represents the mereological structure of the domain it is projected onto; and (c) in terms of the degree of completeness with which a partition represents this domain. (shrink)

REMARKS ON EVOLUTION AND TIME-SCALES, Graham Cairns-Smith; HODGSON'S BLACK BOX, Thomas Clark; DO HODGSON'S PROPOSITIONS UNIQUELY CHARACTERIZE FREE WILL?, Ravi Gomatam; WHAT SHOULD WE RETAIN FROM A PLAIN PERSON'S CONCEPT OF FREE WILL?, Gilberto Gomes; ISOLATING DISPARATE CHALLENGES TO HODGSON'S ACCOUNT OF FREE WILL, Liberty Jaswal; FREE AGENCY AND LAWS OF NATURE, Robert Kane; SCIENCE VERSUS REALIZATION OF VALUE, NOT DETERMINISM VERSUS CHOICE, Nicholas Maxwell; COMMENTS ON HODGSON, J.J.C. Smart; THE VIEW FROM WITHIN, Sean Spence; COMMENTARY ON HODGSON, (...) Henry Stapp. (shrink)

I compare Bratman’s theory with Gilbert’s. I draw attention to their similarities, query Bratman’s claim that his theory is the more parsimonious, and point to one theoretical advantage of Gilbert’s theory.

We propose an ontological theory that is powerful enough to describe both complex spatio-temporal processes and the enduring entities that participate therein. For this purpose we introduce the notion a directly depicting ontology. Directly depicting ontologies are based on relatively simple languages and fall into two major categories: ontologies of type SPAN and ontologies of type SNAP. These represent two complementary perspectives on reality and employ distinct though compatible systems of categories. A SNAP (snapshot) ontology comprehends enduring entities such as (...) organisms, geographic features, or qualities as they exist at some given moment of time. A SPAN ontology comprehends perduring entities such as processes and their parts and aggregates as they unfold themselves through some temporal interval. We give an axiomatic account of the theory of directly depicting ontologies and of the core parts of the metaontological fragment within which they are embedded. (shrink)

Abstract: We propose a view of vagueness as a semantic property of names and predicates. All entities are crisp, on this semantic view, but there are, for each vague name, multiple portions of reality that are equally good candidates for being its referent, and, for each vague predicate, multiple classes of objects that are equally good candidates for being its extension. We provide a new formulation of these ideas in terms of a theory of granular partitions. We show that this (...) theory provides a general framework within which we can understand the relation between vague terms and concepts and the corresponding crisp portions of reality. We also sketch how it might be possible to formulate within this framework a theory of vagueness which dispenses with the notion of truth-value gaps and other artifacts of more familiar approaches. Central to our approach is the idea that judgments about reality involve in every case (1) a separation of reality into foreground and background of attention and (2) the feature of granularity. On this basis we attempt to show that even vague judgments made in naturally occurring contexts are not marked by truth-value indeterminacy. We distinguish, in addition to crisp granular partitions, also vague partitions, and reference partitions, and we explain the role of the latter in the context of judgments that involve vagueness. We conclude by showing how reference partitions provide an effective means by which judging subjects are able to temper the vagueness of their judgments by means of approximations. (shrink)

This paper presents an axiomatic formalization of a theory of top-level relations between three categories of entities: individuals, universals, and collections. We deal with a variety of relations between entities in these categories, including the sub-universal relation among universals and the parthood relation among individuals, as well as cross-categorial relations such as instantiation and membership. We show that an adequate understanding of the formal properties of such relations – in particular their behavior with respect to time – is critical for (...) geographic information processing. The axiomatic theory is developed using Isabelle, a computational system for implementing logical formalisms. All proofs are computer verified and the computational representation of the theory is available online. (shrink)

There are some who defend a view of vagueness according to which there are intrinsically vague objects or attributes in reality. Here, in contrast, we defend a view of vagueness as a semantic property of names and predicates. All entities are crisp, on this view, but there are, for each vague name, multiple portions of reality that are equally good candidates for being its referent, and, for each vague predicate, multiple classes of objects that are equally good candidates for being (...) its extension. We provide a new formulation of these ideas in terms of a theory of granular partitions. We show that this theory provides a general framework within which we can understand the relation between vague terms and concepts on the one hand and correlated portions of reality on the other. We also sketch how it might be possible to formulate within this framework a theory of vagueness which dispenses with the notion of truth-value gaps and other artifacts of more familiar approaches. (shrink)

We propose a new account of vagueness and approximation in terms of the theory of granular partitions. We distinguish different kinds of crisp and non-crisp granular partitions and we describe the relations between them, concentrating especially on spatial examples. We describe the practice whereby subjects use regular grid-like reference partitions as a means for tempering the vagueness of their judgments, and we demonstrate how the theory of reference partitions can yield a natural account of this practice, which is referred to (...) in the literature as ‘approximation’. (shrink)

Published in extended form as "Endurants and Perdurants in Directly Depicting Ontologies", -/- We propose an ontological theory that is powerful enough to describe both complex spatio-temporal processes and the enduring entities that participate in such processes. For this purpose we distinguish between ontologies and metaontology. Ontologies are based on very simple directly depicting languages and fall into two major categories: ontologies of type SPAN and ontologies of type SNAP. These represent two complementary perspectives on reality and result in distinct (...) though compatible systems of categories. In a SNAP (snapshot) ontology we have the enduring entities in a given domain as they exist to be inventoried at some given moment of time. In a SPAN ontology we have perduring entities such as processes and their parts and aggregates. We argue that both kinds of ontology are required, together with the meta-ontology which joins them together. On the level of meta-ontology we are able to impose constraints on ontologies of a sort which can support efficient processing of large amounts of data. (shrink)

Description Logics are nowadays widely accepted as formalisms which provide reasoning facilities which allow us to discover inconsistencies in ontologies in an automatic fashion. Where ontologies are developed in modular fashion, they allow changes in one module to propogated through the system of ontologies automatically in a way which helps to maintain consistency and stability. For this feature to be utilized effectively, however, requires that domain ontologies be represented in a normalized form.

Two senses of ‘ontology’ can be distinguished in the current literature. First is the sense favored by information scientists, who view ontologies as software implementations designed to capture in some formal way the consensus conceptualization shared by those working on information systems or databases in a given domain. [Gruber 1993] Second is the sense favored by philosophers, who regard ontologies as theories of different types of entities (objects, processes, relations, functions) [Smith 2003]. Where information systems ontologists seek to maximize (...) reasoning efficiency even at the price of simplifications on the side of representation, philosophical ontologists argue that representational adequacy can bring benefits for the stability and resistance to error of an ontological framework and also for its extendibility in the future. In bioinformatics, however, a third sense of ‘ontology’ has established itself, above all as a result of the successes of the Gene Ontology (hereafter: GO), which is a tool for the representation and processing of information about gene products and their biological functions [Gene Ontology Consortium 2000]. We show how Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) has established itself as an overarching ontology drawing on all three of the strands distinguished above, and describe applications of BFO especially in the treatment of biological granularity. (shrink)

We propose an ontological theory that is powerful enough to describe both complex spatio-temporal processes (occurrents) and the enduring entities (continuants) that participate in such processes. For this purpose we distinguish between meta-ontology and token ontologies. Token ontologies fall into two major categories: ontologies of type SPAN and ontologies of type SNAP. These represent two complementary perspectives on reality and result in distinct though compatible systems of categories. The meta-ontological level then describes the relationships between the different token ontologies. In (...) a SNAP (snapshot) ontology we have enduring entities such as substances, qualities, roles, functions as these exist to be inventoried at a given moment of time. In a SPAN ontology we have perduring entities such as processes and their parts and aggregates. We argue that both kinds of ontological theory are required, together with the metaontology which joins them together, in order to give a non-reductionistic account of both static and dynamic aspects of the geospatial world. (shrink)

The theory of granular partitions is designed to capture in a formal framework important aspects of the selective character of common-sense views of reality. It comprehends not merely the ways in which we can view reality by conceiving its objects as gathered together not merely into sets, but also into wholes of various kinds, partitioned into parts at various levels of granularity. We here represent granular partitions as triples consisting of a rooted tree structure as first component, a domain satisfying (...) the axioms of Extensional Mereology as second component, and a mapping (called ’projection’) of the first into the second as a third component. We define ordering relations among granular partitions the resulting structures are called partition frames. We then introduce an axiomatic theory which sentences are interpreted in partition frames. (shrink)

This paper provides an axiomatic formalization of a theory of foundational relations between three categories of entities: individuals, universals, and collections. We deal with a variety of relations between entities in these categories, including the is-a relation among universals and the part-of relation among individuals as well as cross-category relations such as instance-of, member-of, and partition-of. We show that an adequate understanding of the formal properties of such relations – in particular their behavior with respect to time – is critical (...) for formal ontology. We provide examples to support this thesis from the domain of biomedicine. (shrink)

The translational research community, in general, and the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) community, in particular, share the vision of repurposing EHRs for research that will improve the quality of clinical practice. Many members of these communities are also aware that electronic health records (EHRs) suffer limitations of data becoming poorly structured, biased, and unusable out of original context. This creates obstacles to the continuity of care, utility, quality improvement, and translational research. Analogous limitations to sharing objective data in (...) other areas of the natural sciences have been successfully overcome by developing and using common ontologies. This White Paper presents the authors’ rationale for the use of ontologies with computable semantics for the improvement of clinical data quality and EHR usability formulated for researchers with a stake in clinical and translational science and who are advocates for the use of information technology in medicine but at the same time are concerned by current major shortfalls. This White Paper outlines pitfalls, opportunities, and solutions and recommends increased investment in research and development of ontologies with computable semantics for a new generation of EHRs. (shrink)

Adam Smith is respected as the father of contemporary economics for his work on systemizing classical economics as an independent field of study in The Wealth of Nations. But he was also a significant moral philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, with its characteristic concern for integrating sentiments and rationality. This article considers Adam Smith as a key moral philosopher of commercial society whose critical reflection upon the particular ethical challenges posed by the new pressures and possibilities of commercial (...) society remains relevant today. The discussion has three parts. First I address the artificial separation between self-interest and morality often attributed to Smith, in which his work on economics is stripped of its ethical context. Second I outline Smith’s ethical approach to economics, focusing on his vigorous but qualified defence of commercial society for its contributions to prosperity, justice, and freedom. Third I outline Smith’s moral philosophy proper as combining a naturalistic account of moral psychology with a virtue ethics based on propriety in commercial society. (shrink)

Whether or not capitalism is compatible with ethics is a long standing dispute. We take up an approach to virtue ethics inspired by Adam Smith and consider how market competition influences the virtues most associated with modern commercial society. Up to a point, competition nurtures and supports such virtues as prudence, temperance, civility, industriousness and honesty. But there are also various mechanisms by which competition can have deleterious effects on the institutions and incentives necessary for sustaining even these most (...) commercially friendly of virtues. It is often supposed that if competitive markets are good, more competition must always be better. However, in the long run competition enhancing policies that neglect the nurturing and support of the bourgeois virtues may undermine the continued flourishing of modern commercial society. (shrink)

The 2013 Rostock Symposium on Systems Biology and Bioinformatics in Aging Research was again dedicated to dissecting the aging process using in silico means. A particular focus was on ontologies, as these are a key technology to systematically integrate heterogeneous information about the aging process. Related topics were databases and data integration. Other talks tackled modeling issues and applications, the latter including talks focussed on marker development and cellular stress as well as on diseases, in particular on diseases of kidney (...) and skin. (shrink)

Historical research has recently made it clear that, prior to Austin and Searle, the phenomenologist Adolf Reinach (1884-1917) developed a full-fledged theory of speech acts under the heading of what he called "social acts". He we consider a second instance of a speech act theory avant la lettre, which is to be found in the common sense philosophy of Thomas Reid (1710-1796). Reid’s s work, in contrast to that of Reinach, lacks both a unified approach and the detailed analyses (...) of pertinent examples. But his writings leave no doubt that he is acutely aware of the very problems concerning language structure and use out of which contemporary speech act theory has evolved and that he goes a good way towards solving these problems in the spirit of the modern theory. (shrink)

It is now generally recognized that figures such as Reid, Peirce, and Reinach formulated theories of speech acts avant la lettre of Austin and Searle, in Reid and Reinach’s cases under the heading ‘theory of social acts’. Here we address the question as to what conditions would have to be satisfied for such theories to count as ‘theories of speech acts’ in the now familiar sense.

Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, later founder and President of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, studied philosophy in the University of Vienna from 1872 to 1876, where he came under the powerful influence of Franz Brentano. We survey the role of Brentano’s philosophy, and especially of his ethics, in Masaryk’s life and work.

Commentary on: Olaf Blanke, Thomas Metzinger, Full-body illusions and minimal phenomenal selfhood, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 13, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 7-13, ISSN 1364-6613, DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2008.10.003.

Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, later founder and President of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, studied philosophy in the University of Vienna from 1872 to 1876, where he came under the powerful influence of Franz Brentano. We survey the role of Brentano’s philosophy, and especially of his ethics, in Masaryk’s life and work.

Works of philosophy written in English have spawned a massive secondary literature dealing with ideas, problems or arguments. 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, but also in relation to more recent German-language philosophy. Yet 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 peculiar asymmetry by examining those factors which might be conducive to the growth of a commentary literature in a given culture. (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)

W dziełach Arystotelesa, lub z medievals, jak również w pismach późniejszych zdroworozsądkowe filozofów, takich jak Thomas Reid czy GE Moore’a, możemy znaleźć rodzinę różnych prób uporania się ze strukturami rozsądku i wspólnego -sense świat, który jest nam dany w normalnym, doświadczenie pre-teoretycznym. Będziemy argumentować, co wynika, że ​​teoria takich struktur stanowi ważny i dotychczas niedoceniany związek między wczesnym psychologii Gestalt z jednej strony, oraz współczesnych osiągnięć w filozofii i sztucznej inteligencji badań na innych.

Mental causation is the causation of physical effects by mental causes. The paradigm case of mental causation is the causation of someone’s bodily movement by a mental state or event of hers. The belief that mental causation exists is deeply rooted in common sense. It seems uncontroversial to say, for instance, that a sudden pain caused Jones to wince, or that Smith’s thirst caused him to have a drink. Nevertheless, explaining how the mind can have physical effects has proven (...) a challenge for philosophers of mind. For physical effects already have physical causes, which threatens the claim that they also have mental causes. The problem is most pressing for positions according to which the mind is not itself physical. However, recent decades have also seen a debate over whether the view that the mind is physical can adequately explain mental causation. (shrink)

The authors of this collection fail to make clear the distinction between naturalistic and purely logical/methodological approaches to the philosophy of science. I also criticise Thomas Nickles's attempt to devise an explanatory method for discovery in science using programs that produce trial and error explorations of a domain, which he thinks replaces the need for a conjecture a refutation approach (cf. Popper and Campbell). Such programs embody undeclared conjectures in the way they are set up.

In this collection of essays, philosopher Paul Russell addresses major figures and central topics of the history of early modern philosophy. Most of these essays are studies on the philosophy of David Hume, one of the great figures in the history of philosophy. One central theme, connecting many of the essays, concerns Hume's fundamental irreligious intentions. Russell argues that a proper appreciation of the significance of Hume's irreligious concerns, which runs through his whole philosophy, serves to discredit the deeply entrenched (...) framework for understanding Hume - and much of early modern philosophy - in terms of the idea of "British Empiricism". In a substantive introduction, Russell outlines how his various insights overlap and connect to each other. -/- The volume is organized thematically into five sections: metaphysics, free will, ethics, religion, and general interpretations of Hume's philosophy. The collection also features a previously unpublished essay on Hume's atheism and an essay on Adam Smith's views on religion and ethics that has not been previously published in English. -/- Recasting Hume and Early Modern Philosophy presents the reader with Russell's substantial and significant set of interconnected observations and insights on the matters and figures of the greatest importance in early modern philosophy. These essays not only provide different and original perspectives on the subject, they also show that the various issues addressed are very relevant to each other, as well as to a number of major topics in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

This book describes the philosophical principles underlying the doctrine (the political project) often called “classical liberalism”. By this expression we mean, in this book, the project for society proposed, during the second half of the eighteenth century, by David Hume and Adam Smith in Great Britain, Turgot and Condorcet in France, Thomas Jefferson in the United States and Kant and Humboldt in Germany. The differences between the principles of “classical liberalism” and those of the extreme doctrines of Milton (...) Friedman and Friedrich Hayek (often confused with 'classical liberalism') are clearly explained. -/- This book has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Vietnamese, Rumanian and Turkish. -/- Several scholars have done me the honor of posting a .pdf version of this work (which is no longer available in paper form). Here are three excellent versions that are easily found : -/- "Les fondements philosophiques du libéralisme jugurtha noblogs" (224 pages), "Les fondements philosophiques du libéralisme" (224 pages), in ZLibrary. -/- "Les fondements philosophiques du libéralisme abdelmagidzarrouki" (224 pages), -/- . (shrink)

Recasting Hume and Early Modern Philosophy is a collection of essays that are all concerned with major figures and topics in the early modern philosophy. Most of the essays are concerned, more specifically, with the philosophy of David Hume (1711-1776). The sixteen essays included in this collection are divided into five parts. These parts are arranged under the headings of: (1) Metaphysics and Epistemology; (2) Free Will and Moral Luck; (3) Ethics, Virtue and Optimism; (4) Skepticism, Religion and Atheism; and (...) (5) Irreligion and the Unity of Hume’s Thought. A particularly important theme running through many of these essays is the subject of Hume’s irreligious aims and intentions. The fifth and final part of the collection is devoted to an articulation and defence of this specific understanding of Hume’s philosophical thought. (shrink)

In this paper we propose an Ontology of Commercial Exchange (OCE) based on Basic Formal Ontology. OCE is designed for re-use in the Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) and in other ontologies addressing different aspects of human social behavior involving purchasing, selling, marketing, and so forth. We first evaluate some of the design patterns used in the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) and Product Types Ontology (PTO). We then propose terms and definitions that we believe will improve the representation of contractual (...) obligations, sales processes, and their associated documents. A commercial exchange, for instance, involves mutual agreement to reciprocate actions, such as transferring money, performing a service, or transferring goods. (shrink)

What follows is a first step towards an ontology of conscious mental processes. We provide a theoretical foundation and characterization of conscious mental processes based on a realist theory of intentionality and using BFO as our top-level ontology. We distinguish three components of intentional mental process: character, directedness, and objective referent, and describe several features of the process character and directedness significant to defining and classifying mental processes. We arrive at the definition of representational mental process as a process that (...) is the bringing into being, sustaining, modifying, or terminating of a mental representation. We conclude by outlining some benefits and applications of this approach. (shrink)

Existing research suggests that people's judgments of actual causation can be influenced by the degree to which they regard certain events as normal. We develop an explanation for this phenomenon that draws on standard tools from the literature on graphical causal models and, in particular, on the idea of probabilistic sampling. Using these tools, we propose a new measure of actual causal strength. This measure accurately captures three effects of normality on causal judgment that have been observed in existing studies. (...) More importantly, the measure predicts a new effect ("abnormal deflation"). Two studies show that people's judgments do, in fact, show this new effect. Taken together, the patterns of people's causal judgments thereby provide support for the proposed explanation. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the role of materiality in human cognition. We address issues such as the ways in which brain functions may change in response to interactions with material forms, the attributes of material forms that may cause change in brain functions, and the spans of time required for brain functions to reorganize when interacting with material forms. We then contrast thinking through materiality with thinking about it. We discuss these in terms of their evolutionary significance and history (...) as attested by stone tools and writing, material forms whose interaction endowed our lineage with conceptual thought and meta-awareness of conceptual domains. (shrink)

We give two social aggregation theorems under conditions of risk, one for constant population cases, the other an extension to variable populations. Intra and interpersonal welfare comparisons are encoded in a single ‘individual preorder’. The theorems give axioms that uniquely determine a social preorder in terms of this individual preorder. The social preorders described by these theorems have features that may be considered characteristic of Harsanyi-style utilitarianism, such as indifference to ex ante and ex post equality. However, the theorems are (...) also consistent with the rejection of all of the expected utility axioms, completeness, continuity, and independence, at both the individual and social levels. In that sense, expected utility is inessential to Harsanyi-style utilitarianism. In fact, the variable population theorem imposes only a mild constraint on the individual preorder, while the constant population theorem imposes no constraint at all. We then derive further results under the assumption of our basic axioms. First, the individual preorder satisfies the main expected utility axiom of strong independence if and only if the social preorder has a vector-valued expected total utility representation, covering Harsanyi’s utilitarian theorem as a special case. Second, stronger utilitarian-friendly assumptions, like Pareto or strong separability, are essentially equivalent to strong independence. Third, if the individual preorder satisfies a ‘local expected utility’ condition popular in non-expected utility theory, then the social preorder has a ‘local expected total utility’ representation. Fourth, a wide range of non-expected utility theories nevertheless lead to social preorders of outcomes that have been seen as canonically egalitarian, such as rank-dependent social preorders. Although our aggregation theorems are stated under conditions of risk, they are valid in more general frameworks for representing uncertainty or ambiguity. (shrink)

We discuss recent progress in the development of cognitive ontologies and summarize three challenges in the coordinated development and application of these resources. Challenge 1 is to adopt a standardized definition for cognitive processes. We describe three possibilities and recommend one that is consistent with the standard view in cognitive and biomedical sciences. Challenge 2 is harmonization. Gaps and conflicts in representation must be resolved so that these resources can be combined for mark-up and interpretation of multi-modal data. Finally, Challenge (...) 3 is to test the utility of these resources for large-scale annotation of data, search and query, and knowledge discovery and integration. As term definitions are tested and revised, harmonization should enable coordinated updates across ontologies. However, the true test of these definitions will be in their community-wide adoption which will test whether they support valid inferences about psychological and neuroscientific data. (shrink)

Legal philosophers and property scholars sometimes disagree over one or more of the following: the meaning of the word 'property,' the concept of property, and the nature of property. For much of the twentieth century, the work of W.N. Hohfeld and Tony Honoré represented a consensus around property. The consensus often went under the heading of property as bundle of rights, or more accurately as a set of normative relations between persons with respect to things. But by the mid-l 990s, (...) the consensus was under attack. Key figures in the attack were James Penner, a legal philosopher, and Thomas W. Merrill and Henry E. Smith, two highly regarded professors of property law. This article aims to repel the attack and argues for property as a set of normative relations between persons with respect to things. The positive case for this view of property pays special attention to the philosophy of language and the analysis of concepts. The positive case also maintains that the right to use and the power to transfer are as central to property as the right to exclude. It is possible that the virtues of Smith's modular theory of property differ from the virtues of a well-crafted bundle theory. Indeed, it may be the case that these two theories throw light on different features of property law and are not, save at the margin, competitors with each other. The label 'new essentialism' sometimes applied to the work of Penner, Merrill, and Smith seems inapt if property does not have an essence. Of course, they might refuse the label. (shrink)

In an era of digital revolution, artificial intelligence, big data and augmented reality, technology has shifted from being a tool of communication to a primary medium of experience and sociality. Some of the most basic human capacities are increasingly being outsourced to machines and we increasingly experience and interpret the world through digital interfaces, with machines becoming ever more ‘social’ beings. Social interaction and human perception are being reshaped in unprecedented ways. This book explores this technologisation of the social and (...) the attendant penetration of permanent liminality into those aspects of the lifeworld where individuals had previously sought some kind of stability and meaning. Through a historical and anthropological examination of this phenomenon, it problematises the underlying logic of limitless technological expansion and our increasing inability to imagine either ourselves or our world in other than technological terms. Drawing on a variety of concepts from political anthropology, including liminality, the trickster, imitation, schismogenesis, participation, and the void, it interrogates the contemporary technological revolution in a manner that will be of interest to sociologists, social and anthropological theorists and scholars of science and technology studies with interests in the digital transformation of social life. -/- Table of Contents -/- Introduction: The Technologisation of the Social: A 21st-Century Megamachine? Paul O’Connor -/- 1. Communication as Theatricalisation: Self-Presentation in the Digital Age Arpad Szakolczai -/- 2. Parasites of the Social: Digital Disruptions of the Labour Market Tom Boland -/- 3. Possessed by Technology: The Metastasis of Absence Agnes Horvath -/- 4. Technologisation of the Social: Symbiosis, Parasitism, or Predation? Daniel Gati -/- 5. J'accuse Zéro: The Technology of Zero and the Making of a Personal Void Ray Griffin -/- 6. Digital Affordances and the Liminal Stephen Turner -/- 7. The Smart Womb: Digital Technologies and the Maze of Trickster Politics Marius Ion Benta -/- 8. Brave New Industry? The Dark Side of Dematerialisation and Industry 4.0 Thomas S.J. Smith -/- 9. ‘What Have You Caught?’: Nannycams and Hidden Cameras as Normalised Surveillance of the Intimate Janos Mark Szakolczai -/- 10. Coercive Visibility: Discipline in the Digital Public Arena Paul O’Connor -/- Conclusion: Is There a Way Out of the Technologisation of the Social? Marius Ion Benta. (shrink)

In May 2010, philosophers, family and friends gathered at the University of Notre Dame to celebrate the career and retirement of Alvin Plantinga, widely recognized as one of the world's leading figures in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of religion. Plantinga has earned particular respect within the community of Christian philosophers for the pivotal role that he played in the recent renewal and development of philosophy of religion and philosophical theology. Each of the essays in this volume engages with some (...) particular aspect of Plantinga's views on metaphysics, epistemology, or philosophy of religion. Contributors include Michael Bergman, Ernest Sosa, Trenton Merricks, Richard Otte, Peter VanInwagen, Thomas P. Flint, Eleonore Stump, Dean Zimmerman and Nicholas Wolterstorff. The volume also includes responses to each essay by Bas van Fraassen, Stephen Wykstra, David VanderLaan, Robin Collins, Raymond VanArragon, E. J. Coffman, Thomas Crisp, and Donald Smith. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that internalistic foundationalist theories of the justification of memory belief are inadequate. Taking a discussion of John Pollock as a starting point, I argue against any theory that requires a memory belief to be based on a phenomenal state in order to be justified. I then consider another version of internalistic foundationalism and claim that it, too, is open to important objections. Finally, I note that both varieties of foundationalism fail to account for the epistemic (...) status of our justified nonoccurrent beliefs, and hence are drastically incomplete. (shrink)

This article examines the ontology and politics of Peter Sloterdijk's Spheres trilogy, focusing in particular upon the notion of microspherical enclosure explicated in the first volume of this series. Noting Sloterdijk's unusual alignment of his philosophy with media theory, three main contentions are put forward. Firstly, that Sloterdijk's reconfiguration of Heidegger's fundamental ontology represents a largely unacknowledged renunciation of the primacy of Being-towards-death in the authentic existence of Dasein, foregrounding instead an originary co-belonging between mother and child. Secondly, that Sloterdijk (...) borrows from media theory a concern regarding the facticity of all communication, grounding philosophical discourse in the determinate locality of its origin, but does so while exalting a pre-natal communicative immediacy that would seem to disparage the everydayness of Dasein. Finally, that Sloterdijk's oft-justified scepticism regarding globalization often retreats into an anti-cosmopolitanism that, in its nostalgia for the comfort, security and immediacy of the matrixial co-belonging, evinces a covert but potentially noxious politics of exclusion. (shrink)