How and why, historian of science Lily Kay asks, did the ‘biological problem of DNA-based protein synthesis’ come to be represented ‘as an information code and a writing technology?’ What sort of metaphor was ‘code’ for these bio-geneticists? One whose run-away expansion, Derrida noted in Of Grammatology (1967), urgently required philosophical justification. Yet, 60 years later, there is still fundamental disagreement about its meaning and epistemic status. If the metaphor lacks ontological purchase, what accounts for its effectiveness? If, on the (...) other hand, scriptural metaphors get at the common root of culture and biology, what do we now mean by ‘code’? In this article, I trace several influential accounts of the metaphor’s effectiveness—making explicit the opposing notions of ‘code’ that animate them—and argue that each is too limited. Greater attention to the metaphoricity of ‘code’ yields a more philosophically productive and critical account of the metaphor of code. (shrink)

BACKGROUND -/- The importance of ontologies in the biomedical domain is generally recognized. However, their quality is often too poor for large-scale use in critical applications, at least partially due to insufficient training of ontology developers. -/- OBJECTIVE -/- To show the efficacy of guideline-based ontology development training on the performance of ontology developers. The hypothesis was that students who received training on top-level ontologies and design patterns perform better than those who only received training in the (...) basic principles of formal ontology engineering. -/- METHODS -/- A curriculum was implemented based on a guideline for ontology design. A randomized controlled trial on the efficacy of this curriculum was performed with 24 students from bioinformatics and related fields. After joint training on the fundamentals of ontology development the students were randomly allocated to two groups. During the intervention, each group received training on different topics in ontology development. In the assessment phase, all students were asked to solve modeling problems on topics taught differentially in the intervention phase. Primary outcome was the similarity of the students’ ontology artefacts compared with gold standard ontologies developed by the authors before the experiment; secondary outcome was the intra-group similarity of group members’ ontologies. -/- RESULTS -/- The experiment showed no significant effect of the guideline-based training on the performance of ontology developers (a) the ontologies developed after specific training were only slightly but not significantly closer to the gold standard ontologies than the ontologies developed without prior specific training; (b) although significant differences for certain ontologies were detected, the intra-group similarity was not consistently influenced in one direction by the differential training. -/- CONCLUSION -/- Methodologically limited, this study cannot be interpreted as a general failure of a guideline-based approach to ontology development. Further research is needed to increase insight into whether specific development guidelines and practices in ontology design are effective. (shrink)

This essay examines the effects of a change from traditional to working ontology on some conceptual problems that are under discussion in the literature : the liar paradox, the announced surprise paradox, the measurement problem, and the uncertainty relation. Some aspects of these puzzles appear to be by-products of the use of traditional ontology - as it is implied, for instance, in naïve realism - where conceptual tools have a (mind-independent) life of their own. Considering (in working (...) class='Hi'>ontology) what people can actually do with the conceptual tools they have facilitates the access to these puzzles. (shrink)

The ontology of Stoic causes and effects was clearly anti-platonic, since the Stoics did not want to admit that any incorporeal entity could have an effect. However, by asserting that any cause was the cause of an incorporeal effect, they returned to Plato’s syntax of causes in the Sophist, whose doctrine of the asymmetry of nouns and verbs identified names with the agents and verbs with the actions. The ontological asymmetry of causes and effects blocked the multiplication of causes (...) by reducing it to an efficient cause. However, while ontology and syntax merged into the doctrine of the effect as an incorporeal predicate, this was further complicated by a relational description of a cause as the effect of a body on a body and by the distinction of causes. Since there are different kinds of causes, not every kind of cause has the same syntactical role in the nexus of causal relations. This refinement of the original syntactical model presumably allowed the Stoics to give a more coherent view of human action than is usually assumed. (shrink)

_This article articulates the presuppositions that psychology inherited from logical positivism, and how_ _those presuppositions effected the interpretation of data and research procedures. Despite the efforts of_ _Wundt, his most well known disciples, Titchener and Külpe, embraced an atomistic view of experience which_ _was at_ _least partly responsible for many of their failures. When the behaviorists rejected the_ _introspectionism of Titchener and Külpe, they kept their atomism, using the reflex_.

The problem of concept representation is relevant for many sub-fields of cognitive research, including psychology and philosophy, as well as artificial intelligence. In particular, in recent years it has received a great deal of attention within the field of knowledge representation, due to its relevance for both knowledge engineering as well as ontology-based technologies. However, the notion of a concept itself turns out to be highly disputed and problematic. In our opinion, one of the causes of this state of (...) affairs is that the notion of a concept is, to some extent, heterogeneous, and encompasses different cognitive phenomena. This results in a strain between conflicting requirements, such as compositionality, on the one hand and the need to represent prototypical information on the other. In some ways artificial intelligence research shows traces of this situation. In this paper, we propose an analysis of this current state of affairs. Since it is our opinion that a mature methodology with which to approach knowledge representation and knowledge engineering should also take advantage of the empirical results of cognitive psychology concerning human abilities, we outline some proposals for concept representation in formal ontologies, which take into account suggestions from psychological research. Our basic assumption is that knowledge representation systems whose design takes into account evidence from experimental psychology may therefore give better results in many applications. (shrink)

OBJECTIVE: (a) To measure the effect of a guideline-based training on the performance of ontology developers compared with the performance after unspecific training by a competency question based evaluation; and (b) to provide empirical evidence for the applicability of competency questions in formal ontology evaluation in general. BACKGROUND: A close connection between ontology development and ontology evaluation as quality management procedure can been attained with the use of competency questions. Competency questions are often used as a (...) semi-formal specification of requirements for an ontology under development. Hence they can also be used as evaluation instruments, in order to check how far an ontology fulfills these requirements. METHODS: A randomized controlled trial was conducted with two groups of 12 students each. The intervention consisted in a differential guideline-based training on ontology development vs. unspecific training. After a group-specific training focusing on three topics per group, performance of students was assessed with 12 exercises (2 exercises per topic), in which the students had to apply their skills. Different types of competency questions were elaborated for the analysis of the students' ontologies. We used the proportion of correct answers as a measure of ontology quality. RESULTS: On single topic level, the performance of ontology developers increased after guideline-based training for two out of the six topics: it increased from a proportion of 0.46 to 0.63 for the topic Process \& Participation and from 0.44 to 0.53 for the topic Collective Material Entity. In regression analysis, a positive correlation was shown between the performance of students on untrained topics and the performance after specific guideline-based training. Moreover, in multiple regression analysis an overall effect of specific training of 0.09 was calculated (p < 0.1). CONCLUSION: The results show an effect of a specific guideline-based training on the performance of ontology developers compared to the performance after unspecific training by an increase of about 10 \% on the rate of correct competency questions. In addition, this study has shown the general applicability of competency questions in a formal ontology evaluation scenario. However, the study also shows that the training of ontology developers and their performance evaluation is a tedious task. The resulting performance of ontology developers is more dependent on the a priori individual competencies than on the specific acquired skills after training. (shrink)

During the Nineties, the diffusion of information and communication technologies allowed a dramatic transformation in art practices. Radically new aesthetic experiences, such as tele-presence, immersivity, responsivity, hyper-mediacy and multimediality, emerge in the framework of the digital arts and call into question not only the traditional status of the work of art but also the fundamental relation with the beholder. The aim of this paper is to define a conceptual framework for the ontology of digital arts by identifying some ontological (...) features that are distinctive to digital idioms. Such an analysis tries to outline how aesthetic and technical innovations affect our cognitive and sensorial relationship with technological artifacts. In the first part, the relation between technogenesis and ontology, as well as the key topics of the ontology of digital arts are discussed. The second part deals with the notion of presence. Despite traditional understandings of digital arts, mainly focused on immateriality, simulation and mediation, my analysis demonstrate how the notion of presence can provide an original perspective in order to understand the ontological status of the mediatized artistic practices. In the last three decades the generalisation of information and telecommunication technologies has played a major role in the transformation of the arts, opening the field to important experiments in the domain of computer graphics, digital audio, robotics and motion capture systems… (Dixon 2007). Peculiar forms of aesthetic experience such as tele-presence, immersivity, responsivity, hyper-mediation and multimediality, progressively arise from digital arts and question not only the status of artwork but also, more generally, the foundational relationship between this latter and the recipient. (shrink)

Both science and philosophy are interested in questions of ontology- questions about what exists and what these things are like. Science and philosophy, however, seem like very different ways of investigating the world, so how should one proceed? Some defer to the sciences, conceived as something apart from philosophy, and others to metaphysics, conceived as something apart from science, for certain kinds of answers. This book contends that these sorts of deference are misconceived. A compelling account of ontology (...) must appreciate the ways in which the sciences incorporate metaphysical assumptions and arguments. At the same time, it must pay careful attention to how observation, experience, and the empirical dimensions of science are related to what may be viewed as defensible philosophical theorizing about ontology. The promise of an effectively naturalized metaphysics is to encourage beliefs that are formed in ways that do justice to scientific theorizing, modeling, and experimentation. But even armed with such a view, there is no one, uniquely rational way to draw lines between domains of ontology that are suitable for belief, and ones in which it would be better to suspend belief instead. In crucial respects, ontology is in the eye of the beholder: it is Informed by underlying commitments with implications for the limits of inquiry, which inevitably vary across rational inquirers. As a result, the proper scope of ontology is subject to a striking form of voluntary choice, yielding a new and transformative conception of scientific ontology. (shrink)

Ian Hacking uses the looping effect to describe how classificatory practices in the human sciences interact with the classified people. While arguably this interaction renders the affected human kinds unstable and hence different from natural kinds, realists argue that also some prototypical natural kinds are interactive and human kinds in general are stable enough to support explanations and predictions. I defend a more fine-grained realist interpretation of interactive human kinds by arguing for an explanatory domain account of the looping effect. (...) First, I argue that knowledge of the feedback mechanisms that mediate the looping effect can supplement, and help to identify, the applicability domain over which a kind and its property variations are stably explainable. Second, by applying this account to cross-cultural case studies of psychiatric disorders, I distinguish between congruent feedback mechanisms that explain matches between classifications and kinds, and incongruent feedback mechanisms that explain mismatches. For example, congruent mechanisms maintain Western auditory experiences in schizophrenia, whereas exporting diagnostic labels inflicts incongruence by influencing local experiences. Knowledge of the mechanisms can strengthen explanatory domains, and thereby facilitate classificatory adjustments and possible interventions on psychiatric disorders. (shrink)

Three accounts of effective realism (ER) have been advanced to solve three problems for scientific realism: Fraser and Vickers (forthcoming) develop a version of ER about non-relativistic quantum mechanics that they argue is compatible with all the main realist versions (‘interpretations’) of quantum mechanics avoiding the problem of underdetermination among them; Williams (2019) and Fraser (2020b) propose ER about quantum field theory as a response to the problems facing realist interpretations; Robertson and Wilson (forthcoming) propose ER to deal with (...) the dubious ontological status of the entities belonging to superseded theories. This paper argues for the unification of these proposals based on realism about modal structure and the idea of scale relativity of ontology developed by ontic structural realists. This solves problems some or all the accounts of ER face, especially that of making explicit in what way they are realist. Furthermore, we respond to a recent critique that has been raised against the ontic structural realist account of quantum mechanics that we employ. (shrink)

I argue that the most promising approach to understanding J.J. Gibson's "affordances" takes affordances themselves as ontological primitives, instead of treating them as dispositional properties of more primitive things, events, surfaces, or substances. These latter are best treated as coalescences of affordances present in the environment (or "coalescences of use-potential," as in Sanders (1994) and Hilditch (1995)). On this view, even the ecological approach's stress on the complementary organism/environment pair is seen as expressing a particular affordance relation between the world (...) and the analyst. That the world is parsed in any way among events and objects, perceivers and worlds, etc., reflects equally features of certain real or possible perspectives on the world and features of the world itself. In section 1, I begin by contending that, contrary to the apparent expectations of some in the field, the bare existence of affordances is surely quite uncontroversial. In section 2, I argue that the most reasonable approach to foundational ontology is a relativistic one. In section 3, I address the claim that affordances must be ontologically complemented by effectivities for the sake of completeness, and I shall argue against that claim on grounds that I take to reflect some of Gibson's most important insights. This work will help to clarify the way affordances are to be used in the fourth and final section, where I argue that ontological work, even within special sciences, should not be merely "regional," and that the most attractive general approach to ontological questions is one that is based on affordances, rather than upon things, events, surfaces, and the like. (shrink)

Because climate change can be seen as the blind spot of contemporary philosophy of technology, while the destructive side effects of technological progress are no longer deniable, this article reflects on the role of technologies in the constitution of the (post)Anthropocene world. Our first hypothesis is that humanity is not the primary agent involved in world-production, but concrete technologies. Our second hypothesis is that technological inventions at an ontic level have an ontological impact and constitutes world. As we object to (...) classical philosophers of technology like Ihde and Heidegger, we will sketch the progressive contribution of our conceptuality to understand the role of technology in the Anthropocene world. Our third hypothesis is that technology has emancipatory potential and in this respect, can inaugurate a post-Anthropocene World. We consider these three hypotheses to develop a philosophical account of the ontology of technology beyond an abstract and deterministic understanding. This concept enables us to philosophically reflect on the role of technology in the Anthropocene World in general, and its contribution to the transition to the post-Anthropocene World in particular. (shrink)

After motivating a framework for evaluating top-down, middle-out, middle-in, and bottom-up ontology development strategies, we apply our framework to investigate whether infectious disease ontologies - specifically, the Virus Infectious Disease Ontology (VIDO) and the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO) - effectively promote semantic interoperability.

I argue that the metaphysical import of the Aharonov-Bohm effect has been overstated: correctly understood, it does not require either rejection of gauge invariance or any novel form of nonlocality. The conclusion that it does require one or the other follows from a failure to keep track, in the analysis, of the complex scalar field to which the magnetic vector potential is coupled. Once this is recognised, the way is clear to a local account of the ontology of electrodynamics (...) ; I sketch a possible such account. (shrink)

Virtually everyone who has advanced an ontology of art has accepted a constraint to the effect that claims about ontology should cohere with the sort of appreciative claims made about artworks within a mature and reflective version of critical practice. I argue that such a constraint, which I agree is appropriate, rules out a one-size-fits-all ontology of contemporary visual art (and thus of visual art in general). Mature critical practice with respect to contemporary art accords artists a (...) significant degree of stipulative authority regarding the features and boundaries of their works. This results in ontological variation among visual artworks. Any claim to the effect that all works belong to the same ontological category will thus come out false or uninformative. Interesting, substantive claims about ontological status can be made only in relation to specific works; that is, we must consider the ontological status of each contemporary artwork individually. The only general ontological claim that can be made about visual artworks (and also about artworks in other forms) is that they belong to the sort of thing that artists create. But this is not a substantive ontological claim. (shrink)

The view of nature we adopt in the natural attitude is determined by common sense, without which we could not survive. Classical physics is modelled on this common-sense view of nature, and uses mathematics to formalise our natural understanding of the causes and effects we observe in time and space when we select subsystems of nature for modelling. But in modern physics, we do not go beyond the realm of common sense by augmenting our knowledge of what is going on (...) in nature. Rather, we have measurements that we do not understand, so we know nothing about the ontology of what we measure. We help ourselves by using entities from mathematics, which we fully understand ontologically. But we have no ontology of the reality of modern physics; we have only what we can assert mathematically. In this paper, we describe the ontology of classical and modern physics against this background and show how it relates to the ontology of common sense and of mathematics. (shrink)

As the international momentum of the school effectiveness movement continues, its exponents remain largely impervious to criticism. This paper argues that while they may not readily align themselves with the individualistic aspects of Conservative social philosophy, their methodology necessarily secretes an atomised social ontology. The charge of ideological commitment rests on the fact that the essentially positivist epistemology employed by school effectiveness researchers presupposes an ontology of closed systems and atomistic events. Thus any notion of the structuring of (...) life‐chances is automatically ruled out of court. The reciprocity of social ontology and methodology is explored in order to account for the myopia of the school effectiveness movement. (shrink)

Consider the most recent Yale-Harvard football game, an event which occurred on 11/20/21 in New Haven, lasting about three hours. This event, like many college football games before, was composed of four quarters, each of which was composed of possessions, each of which was composed of downs, each of which was composed of particular movements, tackles and decisions of the individual players. Each of these parts of the game was itself an event, occurring in a smaller region of space and (...) time than the game itself. Each of these events involved material objects like players, helmets, jerseys, etc. Each had causes and effects, and each instantiated qualitative properties, such as being a kickoff or being a tackle. These are paradigmatic examples of events. Events are many and varied; some other examples include the melting of an ice cube, the birth of a horse, the supernova of a star, the presidential election campaign and a winter snowstorm. Each of these took place in a certain region of spacetime, had other events as parts, involved certain objects, had causes and effects, and instantiated properties. Objects and their properties are not the only furniture in the world. Events are a crucial part of our manifest and scientific pictures of the world. We go to football games, think about and participate in elections, eagerly anticipate the birth of a child, and quantify over and explain such things in our scientific theories. Yet, events have received insufficient attention from metaphysicians. Some philosophers have been skeptical of events, holding that talk of events can be paraphrased away, or that events can be reduced to objects and properties.1 When philosophers have accepted events, their motivations have usually been extrinsic—events are introduced in order to play a role in a larger philosophical system. This tendency has led philosophers to miss a number of interesting features of events. In this paper, I wish to reverse that trend by developing an ontology of events which is not an afterthought with respect to another philosophical project. In so doing, I will provide answers to substantive metaphysical questions about the relations in which events stand and their identity conditions. In the next section, I identify four basic relations in which events stand: parthood, involvement, causation and instantiation, focusing in particular on involvement. Then, I argue that events are individuated by their involvements, and criticize the identity conditions which have been offered by other philosophers, notably Quine, Davidson and Kim. I then conclude. (shrink)

Daniel Dombrowski contends that: a number of versions of the ontological argument [OA] are sound; the deity whose existence is most well established by the OA is the deity picked out by Hartshorne’s neoclassical concept of God; skeptics who insist that the OA only shows that “if God exists, then God exists necessarily” are contradicting themselves, and the OA is worth a great deal since it effectively demonstrates the rationality of theism. I argue that theses and are clearly false and (...) offer a presumptive case for thinking that is false, since, absent an independent proof of God’s existence, the theist appears to be in no position to rationally assert. I also show that the Anselmian OA harmonizes rather poorly with a Hartshornean neoclassical conception of God. I conclude by assessing the philosophical and dialectical worth of ontological arguments vis-à-vis establishing the rationality of theism. (shrink)

I begin by distinguishing two general approaches to metaethics and ontology. One in effect puts our experience as engaged ethical agents on hold while independent metaphysical and epistemological inquiries, operating by their own lights, deliver metaethical verdicts on acceptable interpretations of our ethical lives; the other instead keeps engaged ethical experience in focus and allows our reflective interpretation of it to shape our metaphysical and epistemological views, including our ontology. While the former approach often leads to deflationary views, (...) the latter may lead us to enrich our metaethical picture as needed to capture robust objectivity and categorical normative authority for ethics. Assuming, as I have argued elsewhere, that this requires positing irreducibly evaluative or normative properties and facts, the question I take up here is what ontological implications this has. I argue against quietist non-naturalist views, which maintain that positing such properties and facts either has no ontological implications or has only domain-specific ontological implications that likewise imply nothing about what the world contains. Against these views, I advocate a worldly, dual-aspect view, locating irreducibly evaluative or normative properties as features of relevant worldly things. But while I have previously defended this view as a form of non-naturalism, I here explore the possibility of instead seeing it as a new, more expansive form of naturalism—what might be called “Non-Scientistic Naturalism”—inspired by parallel attempts in the philosophy of mind to accommodate irreducibly phenomenal properties within a more expansive physicalism. (shrink)

This essay focuses on realism in ontology and on the problem of defining reality. According to the definition given by many realists, reality is independent of our thoughts, conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, etc. Yet, this merely negative definition of reality has some disadvantages: it implies a dualistic view, and it is incompatible with scientific realism. As an alternative, I introduce and discuss the traditional definition of reality as effectiveness, or capability of acting. I then attempt to determine to what (...) extent this definition can be helpful in the debate concerning ontological realism. (shrink)

Abstract In light of the complexity of unfolding disasters, the diversity of rapidly evolving events, the enormous amount of generated information, and the huge pool of casualties, emergency responders (ERs) may be overwhelmed and in consequence poor decisions may be made. In fact, the possibility of transporting the wounded victims to one of several hospitals and the dynamic changes in healthcare resource availability make the decision process more complex. To tackle this problem, we propose a multicriteria decision support service, based (...) on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method, that aims to avoid overcrowding and outpacing the capacity of a hospital to effectively provide the best care to victims by finding out the most appropriate hospital that meets the victims’ needs. The proposed approach searches for the most appropriate healthcare institution that can effectively deal with the victims’ needs by considering the availability of the needed resources in the hospital, the victim’s wait time to receive the healthcare, and the transfer time that represents the hospital proximity to the disaster site. The evaluation and validation results showed that the assignment of hospitals was done successfully considering the needs of each victim and without overwhelming any single hospital. (shrink)

Matthias Egg argues that scientific realism can be reconciled with quantum mechanics and its foundational underdetermination by focusing realist commitments on ‘effective’ ontology. I argue in general terms that Egg’s effective realism is ontologically overly promiscuous. I illustrate the issue in relation to both Newtonian mechanics and quantum mechanics.

In the tradition of quantified modal logic, it was assumed that significantly different linguistic systems underlie reference to individuals, to times and to 'possible worlds'. Various results from recent research in formal semantics suggest that this is not so, and that there is in fact a pervasive symmetry between the linguistic means with which we refer to these three domains. Reference to individuals, times and worlds is uniformly effected through generalized quantifiers, definite descriptions, and pronouns, and in each domain grammatical (...) features situate the reference of terms as near, far or 'further' from the actual or from a reported speech act. We outline various directions in which a program of ontological symmetry could be developed, and we offer in the Appendix a symmetric fragment developed in a logic that can be seen as a compromise between an extensional and an intensional system. (shrink)

A longstanding philosophical premise perceives simplicity as a desirable attribute of scientific theories. One of several raised justifications for this notion is that simple theories are more likely to indicate the true makeup of natural systems. Qualitatively parsimonious hypotheses and theories keep to a minimum the number of different postulated entities within a system. Formulation of such ontologically simple working hypotheses proved to be useful in the experimental probing of narrowly defined bio systems. It is less certain, however, whether qualitatively (...) parsimonious theories are effective indicators of the true nature of complex biological systems. This paper assesses the success of ontologically simple theories in envisaging the makeup of three complex systems in bacteriology, immunology, and molecular biology. Evidence shows that parsimonious theories completely misconstrued the actual ontologically complex constitutions of the three examined systems. Since evolution and selective pressures typically produce ontologically intricate rather than simple bio systems, qualitatively parsimonious theories are mostly inapt indicators of the true nature of complex biological systems. (shrink)

As it emerged from philosophical analyses and cognitive research, most concepts exhibit typicality effects, and resist to the efforts of defining them in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. This holds also in the case of many medical concepts. This is a problem for the design of computer science ontologies, since knowledge representation formalisms commonly adopted in this field (such as, in the first place, the Web Ontology Language - OWL) do not allow for the representation of concepts in (...) terms of typical traits. The need of representing concepts in terms of typical traits concerns almost every domain of real world knowledge, including medical domains. In particular, in this article we take into account the domain of mental disorders, starting from the DSM-5 descriptions of some specific disorders. We favour a hybrid approach to concept representation, in which ontology oriented formalisms are combined to a geometric representation of knowledge based on conceptual space. As a preliminary step to apply our proposal to mental disorder concepts, we started to develop an OWL ontology of the schizophrenia spectrum, which is as close as possible to the DSM-5 descriptions. (shrink)

Common sense is on the one hand a certain set of processes of natural cognition - of speaking, reasoning, seeing, and so on. On the other hand common sense is a system of beliefs (of folk physics, folk psychology and so on). Over against both of these is the world of common sense, the world of objects to which the processes of natural cognition and the corresponding belief-contents standardly relate. What are the structures of this world? How does the scientific (...) treatment of this world relate to traditional and contemporary metaphysics and formal ontology? Can we embrace a thesis of common-sense realism to the effect that the world of common sense exists uniquely? Or must we adopt instead a position of cultural relativism which would assign distinct worlds of common sense to each group and epoch? The present paper draws on recent work in computer science (especially in the fields of naive and qualitative physics), in perceptual and developmental psychology, and in cognitive anthropology, in order to consider in a new light these and related questions and to draw conclusions for the methodology and philosophical foundations of the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

Because climate change can be seen as the blind spot of contemporary philosophy of technology, while the destructive side effects of technological progress are no longer deniable, this article reflects on the role of technologies in the constitution of the (post)Anthropocene world. Our first hypothesis is that humanity is not the primary agent involved in world-production, but concrete technologies. Our second hypothesis is that technological inventions at an ontic level have an ontological impact and constitutes world. As we object to (...) classical philosophers of technology like Ihde and Heidegger, we will sketch the progressive contribution of our conceptuality to understand the role of technology in the Anthropocene world. Our third hypothesis is that technology has emancipatory potential and in this respect, can inaugurate a post-Anthropocene World. We consider these three hypotheses to develop a philosophical account of the ontology of technology beyond an abstract and deterministic understanding. This concept enables us to philosophically reflect on the role of technology in the Anthropocene World in general, and its contribution to the transition to the post-Anthropocene World in particular. (shrink)

Combinations of molecules, of biological individuals, or of chemical processes can produce effects that are not simply attributable to the constituents. Such non-redundant causality warrants recognition of those coherences as ontologically significant whenever that efficacy is relevant. With respect to such interaction, the effective coherence is more real than are the components. This ontological view is a variety of structural realism and is also a kind of process philosophy. The designation ‘process structural realism’ (PSR) seems appropriate.

Parallel lives is an ontological model of nature in which quantum mechanics and special relativity are unified in a single universe with a single space-time. Point-like objects called lives are the only fundamental objects in this space-time, and they propagate at or below c, and interact with one another only locally at point-like events in space-time, very much like classical point particles. Lives are not alive in any sense, nor do they possess consciousness or any agency to make decisions—they are (...) simply point objects which encode memory at events in space-time. The only causes and effects in the universe occur when lives meet locally, and thus the causal structure of interaction events in space-time is Lorentz invariant. Each life traces a continuous world-line through space-time, and experiences its own relative world, fully defined by the outcomes of past events along its world-line, which are encoded in its external memory. A quantum field comprises a continuum of lives throughout space-time, and familiar physical systems like particles each comprise a sub-continuum of the lives of the field. Each life carries a hidden internal memory containing a local relative wavefunction, which is a local piece of a pure universal wavefunction, but it is the relative wavefunctions in the local memories throughout space-time which are physically real in PL, and not the universal wavefunction in configuration space. Furthermore, while the universal wavefunction tracks the average behavior of the lives of a system, it fails to track their individual dynamics and trajectories. There is always a preferred separable basis, and for an irreducible physical system, each orthogonal term in this basis is a different relative world—each containing some fraction of the lives of the system. The relative wavefunctions in the lives’ internal memories govern which lives of different systems can meet during future local interactions, and thereby enforce entanglement correlations—including Bell inequality violations. These, and many other details, are explored here, but several aspects of this framework are not yet fleshed out, and work is ongoing. (shrink)

As available intelligence data and information expand in both quantity and variety, new techniques must be deployed for search and analytics. One technique involves the semantic enhancement of data through the creation of what are called ‘ontologies’ or ‘controlled vocabularies.’ When multiple different bodies of heterogeneous data are tagged by means of terms from common ontologies, then these data become linked together in ways which allow more effective retrieval and integration. We describe a simple case study to show how (...) these benefits are being achieved, and we describe our strategy for developing a suite of ontologies to serve the needs of the war-fighter in the ever more complex battlespace environments of the future. (shrink)

This article introduces a novel theoretical framework for addressing epistemic injustice—a phenomenon where certain groups or individuals are systematically excluded from knowledge creation and dissemination processes—by employing ontological relativity and conceptual analysis. “Ontological relativity” refers to a philosophical perspective that posits our understanding of reality as being shaped by our toolbox of concepts, categories, language, and social practices; “conceptual analysis” is a method of inquiry that involves the rigorous examination and deconstruction of a particular concept or set of concepts in (...) order to uncover their constituent elements, relationships, and underlying assumptions. To exemplify the effectiveness of the ontology‐based approach, two paradigmatic applications are explored: (a) educational practices and (b) clinical practice and access to health care. Through the presentation of these applications and the step‐by‐step illustration of the applied methodology, the aim of the article is to showcase the efficacy of ontology in tackling epistemic injustices, suggesting innovative paths for future research in this domain. (shrink)

What is a number? Answering this will answer questions about its philosophical foundations - rational numbers, the complex numbers, imaginary numbers. If we are to write or talk about something, it is helpful to know whether it exists, how it exists, and why it exists, just from a common-sense point of view [Quine, 1948, p. 6]. Generally, there does not seem to be any disagreement among mathematicians, scientists, and logicians about numbers existing in some way, but currently, in the mainstream (...) arena only definitions, descriptions of properties, and effects are presented as evidence. Enough historical description of numbers in history provides an empirical basis of number, although a case can be made that numbers do not exist by themselves empirically. Correspondingly, numbers exist as abstractions. All the while, though, these "descriptions" beg the question of what numbers are ontologically. Advocates for numbers being the ultimate reality have the problem of wrestling with the nature of reality. I start on the road to discovering the ontology of number by looking at where people have talked about numbers as already existing: history. Of course, we need to know not only what ontology is but the problems of identifying one, leading to the selection between metaphysics and provisional approaches. While we seem to be dimensionally limited, at least we can identify a more suitable bootstrapping ontology than mere definitions, leading us to the unity of opposites. The rest of the paper details how this is done and modifies Peano's Postulates. (shrink)

The materialist critics argue that insuperable difficulties are encountered by the hypothesis that immaterial mental events such as thinking can act in any way on material structures such as neurons of the cerebral cortex, as is diagrammed in Fig. 8. Such a presumed action is alleged to be incompatible with the conservation laws of physics, in particular of the First Law of Thermodynamics. This objection would certainly be sustained by 19th century physicists and by neuroscientists and philosophers who are still (...) ideologically in the physics of the 19th century, not recognizing the revolution wrought by quantum physicists in the 20th century. Unfortunately it is rare for a quantum physicist to dare an intrusion into the brain-mind problem. But in a recent book the quantum physicist Margenau (1984) makes a fundamental contribution. It is a remarkable transformation from 19th century physics to be told (p. 22): "that some fields, such as the probability field of quantum mechanics carry neither energy nor matter." He goes on (p. 96) to state: "In very complicated physical systems such as the brain, the neurons and sense organs, whose constituents are small enough to be governed by probabilistic quantum laws, the physical organ is always poised for a multitude of possible changes, each with a definite probability; if one change takes place that requires energy, or more or less energy than another, the intricate organism furnishes it automatically. Hence, even if the mind has anything to do with the change, that is if there is a mind-body interaction, the mind would not be called upon to furnish energy." In summary (p. 97) Margenau states that: "The mind may be regarded as a field in the accepted physical sense of the term. But it is a nonmaterial field; its closest analogue is perhaps a probability field. It cannot be compared with the simpler nonmaterial fields that require the presence of matter (e.g. gravity) nor does it necessarily have a definite position in space. And so far as present evidence goes it is not an energy field in any physical sense, nor is it required to contain energy in order to account for all known phenomena in which mind interacts with brain". In formulating more precisely the dualist hypothesis of mind-brain interaction, the initial statement is that the whole world of mental events (World 2) has an existence as autonomous as the world of matter-energy (World I ) (Fig. 1). The present interactionist hypothesis does not relate to these ontological problems, but merely to the mode of action of mental events on neural events, that is of the nature of the downward arrows across the frontier in Fig. 8. Following Margenau (1984) the hypothesis is that mind-brain interaction is analogous to a probability field of quantum mechanics, which has neither mass nor energy, yet can cause effective action at microsites. More specifically it is proposed that the mental concentration involved in intentions (Figs. 7, 8) or attention (Fig. 4) or planned thinking (Figs. 5, 6) can cause neural events by a process analogous to the probability fields of quantum mechanics. -/- We can ask: what neural events could be appropriate recipients for mental fields that are analogous to quantal probability fields? Already we may have the answer in recent discoveries on the nature of the synaptic mechanism whereby one nerve cell communicates with another. (shrink)

All social phenomena, all social interaction, anything that exists in society, is temporal. Anticipation of futures is a necessary part of all social actions, and particularly so in the world of modern organisations. If social sciences are to be relevant they should also be able to say something about possible and likely futures. My paper articulates an ontology for futures studies and then, on that ontological basis, specifies the methodology of futures studies. Critical realist ontology explains why there (...) are multiple possible futures. The actual is only a part of the real world, which also consists of non-actualised possibilities and unexercised powers of the already existing structures and mechanisms that are transfactually efficacious in open systems. Social sciences are also involved in envisaging better possible futures in terms of concrete utopias. However, building concrete utopias is not the only task of a futurologist. We are also interested in other possible and likely futures, and in determining the ways in which our actions and the actions of others contribute—sometimes via unintended effects and consequences—to making some of them real. Empirico-analytical models have a role to play, as do systematic modelling of geo-historical realities: embodied agency and actors; modes of action; rules and principles; resources, as competencies and facilities; practices; relational structures ; and self-organising social systems. However, scenario-construction should also be seen as self-reflective exercise in cultural studies, moral philosophy and creative ability. (shrink)

An effective field theory is a theory of the dynamics of a physical system at energies small compared to a given cut-off. Low-energy states with respect to this cut-off are effectively independent of states at high energies; hence one may study the low-energy dynamics without the need for a detailed description of the high-energy dynamics. Many authors have suggested that, because of the essential role the cut-off plays in the standard method of constructing an EFT, an appropriate interpretation of (...) an EFT requires a realistic interpretation of the cut-off. For some, this suggests an ontology of "quasi-autonomous domains" ; for others, it suggests an ontology in which space is discrete and finite ; and for yet others, it suggests that EFTs engage in idealizations and are inherently approximate. I argue that these interpretations are not forced upon us, in so far as there is an alternative to the Wilsonian method for constructing an EFT that does not explicitly employ a cut-off. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to urge that the normal platonistic account of mathematical truth is unsatisfactory even if pure abstract entities are assumed to exist (in a non-Question-Begging way). It is argued that the task of delineating an interpretation of a formal mathematical theory among pure abstract entities is not one that can be accomplished. An important effect of this conclusion on the question of the ontological commitments of informal mathematical theories is discussed. The paper concludes with (...) a sketch of a non-Platonistic theory of mathematical truth which utilizes an unanalyzed notion of logical possibility. (shrink)

Applied technological developments are represented by (1) genetic engineering as management tools of biological evolution and (2) socio-economic engineering as management tools of civilizational and socio-cultural development. This binary structure logically follows from the postulated three-module organization of the sustainable evolutionary strategy of the sentient human being. Naturphilosophy once again acquires the status of the basis of the theory of evolution in an explicit way. There is a system of metaphysical postulates and ontological categories derived from the anthropic principle of (...) participation. For modern neoliberal political democracy, bio-power and biopolitics look like the most effective technology for stabilizing the scenarios and trends of the global evolutionary process that are optimal within this ideological system. Conclusions.Transbipolitics in our understanding is a political problematic related to the rationalization of the global evolutionary process. In the coming decades transbipolitics will become the carrier element of the global process of evolution of the noosphere with the consequent complication and increase of cohesion between the individual socio-cultural types that are part of the system of modern globalizing civilization. (shrink)

In the tradition of quantified modal logic, it was assumed that significantly different linguistic systems underlie reference to individuals, to times and to ‘possible worlds’. Various results from recent research in formal semantics suggest that this is not so, and that there is in fact apervasive symmetrybetween the linguistic means with which we refer to these three domains. Reference to individuals, times and worlds is uniformly effected through generalized quantifiers, definite descriptions, and pronouns, and in each domain grammatical features situate (...) the reference of terms as near, far or ‘further’ from the actual or from a reported speech act. We outline various directions in which a program ofontological symmetrycould be developed, and we offer in theAppendixa symmetric fragment developed in a logic that can be seen as a compromise between an extensional and an intensional system. (shrink)

There are two different ways of understanding the notion of ‘ontological commitment ’. A question about ‘what is said to be’ by a theory or ‘what a theory says there is’ deals with ‘explicit’ commitment ; a question about the ontological costs or preconditions of the truth of a theory concerns ‘implicit’ commitment. I defend a conception of ontological commitment as implicit commitment, and argue that existentially quantified idioms in natural language are implicitly, but not explicitly, committing. I use the (...) distinction between the two kinds of ontological commitment to diagnose a flaw in a widely used argument to the effect that existential quantification is not ontologically committing. (shrink)

Data heterogeneity is the obstacle for the resource sharing on Semantic Web, and ontology is regarded as a solution to this problem. However, since different ontologies are constructed and maintained independently, there also exists the heterogeneity problem between ontologies. Ontology matching is able to identify the semantic correspondences of entities in different ontologies, which is an effective method to address the ontology heterogeneity problem. Due to huge memory consumption and long runtime, the performance of the existing (...) ontology matching techniques requires further improvement. In this work, an extended compact genetic algorithm-based ontology entity matching technique is proposed, which uses both the compact encoding mechanism and linkage learning approach to match the ontologies efficiently. Compact encoding mechanism does not need to store and maintain the whole population in the memory during the evolving process, and the utilization of linkage learning protects the chromosome’s building blocks, which is able to reduce the algorithm’s running time and ensure the alignment’s quality. In the experiment, ECGA-OEM is compared with the participants of ontology alignment evaluation initiative and the state-of-the-art ontology matching techniques, and the experimental results show that ECGA-OEM is both effective and efficient. (shrink)

Maintaining systems of military plans is critical for military effectiveness, but is also challenging. Plans will become obsolete as the world diverges from the assumptions on which they rest. If too many ad hoc changes are made to intermeshed plans, the ensemble may no longer lead to well-synchronized and coordinated operations, resulting in the system of plans becoming itself incoherent. We describe in what follows an Adaptive Planning process that we are developing on behalf of the Air Force Research Laboratory (...) (Rome) with the goal of addressing problems of these sorts through cyclical collaborative plan review and maintenance. The interactions of world state, blue force status and associated plans are too complex for manual adaptive processes, and computer-aided plan review and maintenance is thus indispensable. We argue that appropriate semantic technology can 1) provide richer representation of plan-related data and semantics, 2) allow for flexible, non-disruptive, agile, scalable, and coordinated changes in plans, and 3) support more intelligent analytical querying of plan-related data. (shrink)

All social phenomena, all social interaction, anything that exists in society, is temporal. Anticipation of futures is a necessary part of all social actions, and particularly so in the world of modern organisations. If social sciences are to be relevant they should also be able to say something about possible and likely futures. My paper articulates an ontology for futures studies and then, on that ontological basis, specifies the methodology of futures studies. Critical realist ontology explains why there (...) are multiple possible futures. The actual is only a part of the real world, which also consists of non-actualised possibilities and unexercised powers of the already existing structures and mechanisms that are transfactually efficacious in open systems. Social sciences are also involved in envisaging better possible futures in terms of concrete utopias. However, building concrete utopias is not the only task of a futurologist. We are also interested in other possible and likely futures, and in determining the ways in which our actions and the actions of others contribute—sometimes via unintended effects and consequences—to making some of them real. Empirico-analytical models have a role to play, as do systematic modelling of geo-historical realities: embodied agency and actors; modes of action; rules and principles; resources, as competencies and facilities; practices; relational structures (of power); and self-organising social systems (also as collective actors). However, scenario-construction should also be seen as self-reflective exercise in cultural studies, moral philosophy and creative ability (in the same way that research and development or the arts are creative). (shrink)

While the presence of monsters in popular culture is ever-increasing, their use as an explicit or implicit category to frame, stigmatise, and demonise the other is seemingly on the rise. At the same time, academic interest for monsters is ever-growing. Usually, monstrosity is understood as a category that emerges to signal a transgression to a given order; this approach has led to the demystification of the insidious characterisations of the (racial, sexual, physical) other as monstrous. While this effort has been (...) necessary, its collateral effects have reduced the monstrous to a mere (socio-cultural) construction of the other: a dialectical framing that de facto deprives monstrosity from any reality. 'Monstrous Ontologies: Politics, Ethics, Materiality' proffers the necessity of challenging these monstrous otherings and their perverse socio-political effects, whilst also asserting that the monstrous is not simply an epistemological construct, but that it has an ontological reality. There is a profound difference between monsters and monstrosity. While the former is an often sterile political and social simplification, the end-product of rhetorical and biopolitical apparatuses; the latter may be understood as a dimension that nurtures the un-definable, that is, that shows the limits of these apparatuses by embodying their material excess: not a 'cultural frame', but the limit to the very mechanism of 'framing'. The monstrous expresses the combining, hybridising, becoming, and creative potential of socio-natural life, albeit colouring this powerful vitalism with the dark hue of a fearful, disgusting, and ultimately indigestible reality that cannot simply be embraced with multicultural naivety. As such, it forces us towards radically changing not the categories, but the very mechanisms of categorisation through which reality is framed and acted upon. Here lies the profound ethical dimension that monstrosity forces us to acknowledge; here lies its profoundly political potential, one that cannot be unfolded by merely deconstructing monstrosity, and rather requires to engage with its uncomfortable, appalling, and revealing materiality. This book will appeal to postgraduate students, PostDocs, and academics alike in the fields of philosophy, critical theory, humanities, sociology and social theory, criminology, human geography, and critical legal theory. (shrink)

In his recent Immaterialism, Graham Harman develops a theory of social objects based on his object-oriented ontology. Whereas some of the more mainstream theories in the humanities would dissolve such objects into their material constituents or their various effects on others, object-oriented social theory theorizes them as inert, resilient entities with a private reality that exceeds their components and actions. Harman’s theory focuses on what social entities are qua objects, and consequently says little about their specificity as social objects. (...) A more complete social theory would also outline how human existence is to be understood in relation to a social world comprised of discrete and inert entities, as opposed to, for example, far more continuous material fields or networks of associations. We argue that an unexpected yet solid candidate for such an extension of object-oriented social theory already exists in Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of practico-inert being and group formation. We first outline Harman’s and Sartre’s respective ontologies of social objects, and then discuss how their many complementarities make the latter a suitable extension of the former. (shrink)