The integration of standardized biomedical terminologies into a single, unified knowledge representation system has formed a key area of applied informatics research in recent years. The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is the most advanced and most prominent effort in this direction, bringing together within its Metathesaurus a large number of distinct source-terminologies. The UMLS Semantic Network, which is designed to support the integration of these source-terminologies, has proved to be a highly successful combination of formal coherence and broad scope. (...) We argue here, however, that its organization manifests certain structural problems, and we describe revisions which we believe are needed if the network is to be maximally successful in realizing its goals of supporting terminology integration. (shrink)

Originally published in 1968. This is a critical study of the concept of 'rule' featuring in law, ethics and much philosophical analysis which the author uses to investigate the concept of 'rationality'. The author indicates in what manner the modes of reasoning involved in reliance upon rules are unique and in what fashion they provide an alternative both to the modes of logico-mathematical reasoning and to the modes of scientific reasoning. This prepares the groundwork for a methodology meeting the requirements (...) of the fields using rules such as law and ethics which could be significant for communications theory and the use of computers in normative fields. Other substantive issues related to the mainstream of legal philosophy are discussed - theories of interpretation, the notion of purpose and the requirements of principled decision-making. The book utilizes examples drawn from English and American legal decisions to suggest how the positions of legal positivism and of natural law are equally artificial and misleading. (shrink)

Rabbis of thirteenth-century Spain were often exposed to two traditions, that of Northern France-Germany and that of Moslem Spain. Until now, the dominant discussion of how they balanced the contrast has been Bernard Septimus' analysis of Nahmanides (Ramban), who managed to draw fruitfully on both. Rabbenu Yonah b. Abraham of Gerona, Ramban's only slightly less famous relative, presents a useful counterexample.Rabbenu Yonah's early works reflect an almost-total immersion in Northern French ways of thinking and writing. Only gradually does he engage (...) ideas from Moslem Spain, suggesting that the mixing of the two traditions in his later writings resulted from years of slow growth and exposure to such Moslem Spanish authors as Rif, R. Bahye ibn Paquda, and Maimonides.His example suggests that how to react to these differing influences was a continuing issue for these rabbis, and that tracking it offers an important key to understanding the intellectual history of the rabbis of that era. (shrink)

Frege’s distinction between sense (Sinn) and meaning (Bedeutung) is his most influential contribution to philosophy, however central it was to his own projects, and however he may have conceived its importance. Philosophers of language influenced by, or reacting against the distinction, and historians of philosophy commenting on it, have all contributed to the voluminous literature surrounding it.1 Nonetheless in this essay I hope to shed new light on the distinction by considering it in the context of the development of Frege’s (...) thought, and connecting it more intimately than is usually done with Frege’s interests in logic, especially his views on judgment, truth and inference, which were central to his own projects as he conceived them. (shrink)

Strategies for improving individual decision making have attracted attention from a range of disciplines. Surprisingly, neuroscience has been largely absent from this conversation, despite the fact that it has recently begun illuminating the neural bases of how and why we make decisions, and is poised for further such advances. Here we address empirical and normative questions about “nudging” through the lens of neuroscience. We suggest that the neuroscience of decision making can provide a framework for understanding how nudges work, and (...) how they can be improved. Towards this end, we first examine how nudges can be incorporated into a leading model of decision making supported by neurobiological data, and use the model to make predictions about the relative effectiveness of different classes of nudges. We then use the model to demonstrate how nudges can both infringe upon and promote autonomy. Finally, we explore the normative implications of the converging consensus from neuroscience and related fields that many everyday decisions are susceptible to covert external influences. (shrink)

Rorty claimed that politics is more important than science and philosphy, even his own philosophy. From pragmatist point of view science is also problemsolving and belongs to practice in broader sense.

Rorty claims that humans do not have absolute moral norms in metaphysical sense. There are important values and principles for him, but from his idea of contingency followes that he prefers the actual redescription and evaluation of every particular situation.

Fine and Kripke extended S5, S4, S4.2 and such to produce propositionally quantified systems , , : given a Kripke frame, the quantifiers range over all the sets of possible worlds. is decidable and, as Fine and Kripke showed, many of the other systems are recursively isomorphic to second-order logic. In the present paper I consider the propositionally quantified system that arises from the topological semantics for S4, rather than from the Kripke semantics. The topological system, which I dub , (...) is strictly weaker than its Kripkean counterpart. I prove here that second-order arithmetic can be recursively embedded in . In the course of the investigation, I also sketch a proof of Fine's and Kripke's results that the Kripkean system is recursively isomorphic to second-order logic. (shrink)

Where humans can manipulate and integrate the information they receive in subtle and ever-changing ways from context to context, computers need structured and context-free background information of a sort which ontologies can help to provide. A domain ontology captures the stable, highly general and commonly accepted core knowledge for an application domain. The domain at issue here is that of the life sciences, in particular molecular biology and bioinformatics. Contemporary life science research includes components drawn from physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine (...) and many other areas, and all of these dimensions, as well as fundamental philosophical issues, must be taken into account in the construction of a domain ontology. Here we describe the basic features of domain ontologies in the life sciences and show how they can be used. (shrink)

This book is the fourth volume of selected papers from the Central European Pragmatist Forum (CEPF). It deals with the general question of self and society, and the papers are organized into sections on Self and History, Self and Society, Self and Politics, Self and Neopragmatism, and an Interview with Richard Rorty. The authors are among the leading specialists in American philosophy from universities across the US and in Central and Eastern Europe.

Moral Case Deliberation is an up and coming form of ethics support wherein clinical professionals deliberate about moral questions they face in their work. So far, it has been unclear what quality of deliberation in MCD is entailed and how to evaluate this quality. This article proposes a coding scheme that fits the theoretical background of MCD and allows researchers to evaluate the quality of the deliberation in MCDs. We consider deliberation in MCD to be of good quality when participants (...) enrich their own understanding of a case by being exposed to the viewpoints of others. In order to have such an enriching effect, the deliberation in an MCD ought to involve different kinds of arguments from the perspectives of different stakeholders and in favour of different resolutions to the case; and the process of deliberation ought to be critical but constructive. (shrink)

The article considers approaches in order to study large municipal entities and their economic potential. The authors specify that large municipal entities in modern conditions have a multifunctional structure, so they propose an interdisciplinary approach to their study. The article discusses such approaches to analyzing large municipalities as: philosophical; research from the perspective of social sciences and the humanities (political science, sociological, psychological, historiographic and ethnographic approaches). The authors analyze large municipalities from the perspective of the geographical approach; urban theory; (...) urban planning and architecture. The problem of studying large municipalities in the legal sciences is separately investigated. With the help of the economic approach the authors show that at the core of urbanization and the emergence of large municipalities there are three effects: comparative advantage, concentration effect, and localization effect. The authors give classification of large municipalities. The authors propose a systematic approach to analyzing large cities, representing the unity of the functional approach, open systems methodology and the factor approach. Under the latter, it is proposed to understand the economic potential of the city, which presupposes the possibility of efficient use of available resources and their maximum inclusion in social reproduction in order to meet the needs of the municipality population. The authors substantiate the classification of the economic potential of a large municipal formation, which consists of: the resource (basic and used), innovative and infrastructural potentials. (shrink)

O presente artigo tem o escopo de analisar as influências deixadas por Hans Kelsen e sua Teoria Pura do Direito para a Hermenêutica Jurídica e as incertezas ainda presentes em sua clássica obra sobre o processo interpretativo. O positivismo kelseniano, reconhecido pela separação entre direito e moral, não se omitiu quanto à realidade da interpretação jurídica, e, sem desconsiderar suas bases teóricas, deixou diretrizes para a consolidação de uma teoria da interpretação. Kelsen desenvolveu o conceito de moldura normativa como um (...) limite para o intérprete autêntico da norma cuja subjetividade influenciaria o processo interpretativo, mas também viu possibilidades de interpretações fora desta moldura. O trabalho pretende entender estas possibilidades de interpretação, analisando Hans Kelsen e seus ensinamentos sobre interpretação jurídica. (shrink)

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

Legal theorists have characterized physical evidence of brain dysfunction as a double-edged sword, wherein the very quality that reduces the defendant’s responsibility for his transgression could simultaneously increase motivations to punish him by virtue of his apparently increased dangerousness. However, empirical evidence of this pattern has been elusive, perhaps owing to a heavy reliance on singular measures that fail to distinguish between plural, often competing internal motivations for punishment. The present study employed a test of the theorized double-edge pattern using (...) a novel approach designed to separate such motivations. We asked a large sample of participants (N = 330) to render criminal sentencing judgments under varying conditions of the defendant’s mental health status (Healthy, Neurobiological Disorder, Psychological Disorder) and the disorder’s treatability (Treatable, Untreatable). As predicted, neurobiological evidence simultaneously elicited shorter prison sentences (i.e., mitigating) and longer terms of involuntary hospitalization (i.e., aggravating) than equivalent psychological evidence. However, these effects were not well explained by motivations to restore treatable defendants to health or to protect society from dangerous persons but instead by deontological motivations pertaining to the defendant’s level of deservingness and possible obligation to provide medical care. This is the first study of its kind to quantitatively demonstrate the paradoxical effect of neuroscientific trial evidence and raises implications for how such evidence is presented and evaluated. (shrink)

This chapter examines Richard Rorty's conception of what it means to be a public intellectual in the modern world and how this conception is related to his pragmatist approach to philosophy. It also discusses the influence that this conception and approach had on Central Europe. In doing so, it outlines for the first time, and in some detail, the close contact that Rorty had, through his books, and more personally through conferences, lectures, and seminars, with philosophers in countries such as (...) Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. (shrink)