74,786 research outputs found
Ontologies, Mental Disorders and Prototypes
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 do not allow for the representation of concepts in terms of typical traits. However, 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 mental disorders. On this respect, we favor a hybrid approach to the representation of psychiatric concepts, in which ontology oriented formalisms are combined to a geometric representation of knowledge based on conceptual spaces
Cognitive Semantics: An Extension of the Cartesian Legacy
The basic intention of this article is to show how the cognitive semantics inherits its ancestry from the Cartesian foundation. The emergence of the cognitive semantics is envisaged here as an integral part of the knowledge evolution, in terms of shifts, which ultimately determines the future direction of our epistemological quest. Basically two questions have been emphasized here: (a) how (and what amount of) common sense metaphysics can be incorporated within the existing system of knowledge; and (b) is there any substratum where the mind-body dualism can be boiled down
Towards an ontology of common sense
Philosophers from Plotinus to Paul Churchland have yielded to the temptation to embrace doctrines which contradict the core beliefs of common sense. Philosophical realists have on the other hand sought to counter this temptation and to vindicate those core beliefs. The remarks which follow are to be understood as a further twist of the wheel in this never-ending battle. They pertain to the core beliefs of common sense concerning the external reality that is given in everyday experience -the beliefs of folk physics, as we might call them. Just as critics of Churchland et al. have argued that the folk-psychological ontology of beliefs, desires, etc. yields the best explanation we can have of the order of cognitive phenomena conceived from the perspective of
first-person experience, so we shall argue that (1) the commonsensical ontology
of folk physics yields the best explanation we can have of our externally directed
cognitive experience and that (2) an ontology of mesoscopic things, events and
processes must play a role, in particular, in our best scientific theory of human
action
Ontological Foundations for Geographic Information Science
We propose as a UCGIS research priority the topic of âOntological Foundations for Geographic Information.â Under this umbrella we unify several interrelated research subfields, each of which deals with different perspectives on geospatial ontologies and their roles in geographic information science. While each of these subfields could be addressed separately, we believe it is important to address ontological research in a unitary, systematic fashion, embracing conceptual issues concerning what would be required to establish an exhaustive ontology of the geospatial domain, issues relating to the choice of appropriate methods for formalizing ontologies, and considerations regarding the design of ontology-driven information systems. This integrated approach is necessary, because there is a strong dependency between the methods
used to specify an ontology, and the conceptual richness, robustness and tractability of the ontology itself. Likewise, information system implementations are needed as testbeds of the usefulness of every aspect of an exhaustive ontology of the geospatial domain. None of the current UCGIS research priorities provides such an integrative perspective, and therefore the topic of âOntological Foundations for Geographic Information Scienceâ is unique
Towards a Reference Terminology for Ontology Research and Development in the Biomedical Domain
Ontology is a burgeoning field, involving researchers from the computer science, philosophy, data and software engineering, logic, linguistics, and terminology domains. Many ontology-related terms with precise meanings in one of these domains have different meanings in others. Our purpose here is to initiate a path towards disambiguation of such terms. We draw primarily on the literature of biomedical informatics, not least because the problems caused by unclear or ambiguous use of terms have been there most thoroughly addressed. We advance a proposal resting on a distinction of three levels too often run together in biomedical ontology research: 1. the level of reality; 2. the level of cognitive representations of this reality; 3. the level of textual and graphical artifacts. We propose a reference terminology for ontology research and development that is designed to serve as common hub into which the several competing disciplinary terminologies can be mapped. We then justify our terminological choices through a critical treatment of the âconcept orientationâ in biomedical terminology research
An Introduction to Ontology
Analytical philosophy of the last one hundred years has been heavily influenced by a doctrine to the effect that one can arrive at a correct ontology by paying attention to certain superficial (syntactic) features of first-order predicate logic as conceived by Frege and Russell. More specifically, it is a doctrine to the effect that the key to the ontological structure of reality is captured syntactically in the âFaâ (or, in more sophisticated versions, in the âRabâ) of first-order logic, where âFâ stands for what is general in reality and âaâ for what is individual. Hence âf(a)ntologyâ. Because predicate logic has exactly two syntactically different kinds of referring expressionsââFâ, âGâ, âRâ, etc., and âaâ, âbâ, âcâ, etc.âso reality must consist of exactly two correspondingly different kinds of entity: the general (properties, concepts) and the particular (things, objects), the relation between these two kinds of entity being revealed in the predicate-argument structure of atomic formulas in first-order logic
Introduction
Husserlâs philosophy, by the usual account, evolved through three stages: 1. development of an anti-psychologistic, objective foundation of logic and mathematics, rooted in Brentanian descriptive psychology; 2. development of a new discipline of "phenomenology" founded on a metaphysical position dubbed "transcendental idealism"; transformation of phenomenology from a form of methodological solipsism into a phenomenology of intersubjectivity and ultimately (in his Crisis of 1936) into an ontology of the life-world, embracing the social worlds of culture and history. We show that this story of three revolutions can provide at best a preliminary orientation, and that Husserl was constantly expanding and revising his philosophical system, integrating views in phenomenology, ontology, epistemology and logic with views on the nature and tasks of philosophy and science as well as on the nature of culture and the world in ways that reveal more common elements than violent shifts of direction. We argue further that Husserl is a seminal figure in the evolution from traditional philosophy to the characteristic philosophical concerns of the late twentieth century: concerns with representation and intentionality and with problems at the borderlines of the philosophy of mind, ontology, and cognitive science
Barry Smith an sich
Festschrift in Honor of Barry Smith on the occasion of his 65th Birthday. Published as issue 4:4 of the journal Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization. Includes contributions by Wolfgang Grassl, Nicola Guarino, John T. Kearns, Rudolf LĂŒthe, Luc Schneider, Peter Simons, Wojciech Ć»eĆaniec, and Jan WoleĆski
Topological Foundations of Cognitive Science
A collection of papers presented at the First International Summer Institute in Cognitive Science, University at Buffalo, July 1994, including the following papers:
** Topological Foundations of Cognitive Science, Barry Smith
** The Bounds of Axiomatisation, Graham White
** Rethinking Boundaries, Wojciech Zelaniec
** Sheaf Mereology and Space Cognition, Jean Petitot
** A Mereotopological Definition of 'Point', Carola Eschenbach
** Discreteness, Finiteness, and the Structure of Topological Spaces, Christopher Habel
** Mass Reference and the Geometry of Solids, Almerindo E. Ojeda
** Defining a 'Doughnut' Made Difficult, N .M. Gotts
** A Theory of Spatial Regions with Indeterminate Boundaries, A.G. Cohn and N.M. Gotts
** Mereotopological Construction of Time from Events, Fabio Pianesi and Achille C. Varzi
** Computational Mereology: A Study of Part-of Relations for Multi-media Indexing, Wlodek Zadrozny and Michelle Ki
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