A review of U. Mäki (ed.). Fact and Fiction in Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. pp. xvi 384. ISBN 0521 00957. As people interested mainly in theory, methodologists and philos...

This paper contributes to the computer ethics debate on software ownership protection by examining the ontological, methodological, and ethical problems related to property right infringement that should come prior to any legal discussion. The ontological problem consists in determining precisely what it is for a computer program to be a copy of another one, a largely neglected problem in computer ethics. The methodological problem is defined as the difficulty of deciding whether a given software system is a copy of another (...) system. And the ethical problem corresponds to establishing when a copy constitutes, or does not constitute, a property right infringement. The ontological problem is solved on the logical analysis of abstract machines, and the latter are argued to be the appropriate level of abstraction for software at which the methodological and the ethical problems can be successfully addressed. (shrink)

Philosophers of science have long been concerned with the question of what a given scientific theory tells us about the contents of the world, but relatively little attention has been paid to how we set out to build theories and to the relevance of pre-theoretical methodology on a theory’s interpretation. In the traditional view, the form and content of a mature theory can be separated from any tentative ontological assumptions that went into its development. For this reason, the target of (...) interpretation is taken to be the mature theory and nothing more. On this view, positions on ontology emerge only once a theory is to hand, not as part of the process of theory building. Serious attention to theory creation suggests this is too simple. In particular, data collection and experimentation are influenced both by theory and by assumptions about the entities thought to be the target of study. Initial reasoning about possible ontologies has an influence on the choice of theoretical variables as well as on the judgments of the methodology appropriate to investigate them. (shrink)

Russian Abstract: Данный документ является сборником «заметок на полях», раскрывающих состав и содержание метода структурно-онтологического анализа. Указанный метод разработан для системного описания предметной области изучаемых явлений. Он включает специальную процедуру по построению структурно-онтологических матриц и алгоритм их описания. Междисциплинарная направленность метода продемонстрирована на примере анализа процесса социализации личности. English Abstract: This document is a collection of `marginal notes` revealing the composition and content of the structural ontological analysis method. The specified method is developed for a systemic description of the subject (...) matter area of the studied phenomena. It includes a special procedure for constructing structural-ontological matrices and an algorithm for their description. The interdisciplinary focus of the method is demonstrated by the example of an analysis of the personality socialization process. (shrink)

In order for the valuable research published in the Anthropology of Consciousness (AoC) journal to have the impact it ought to have upon the anthropological mainstream, contributors must demonstrate that they appreciate the historical tradition of anthropology as an intellectual forebear. Although “ethnometaphysics” has been cited sporadically by anthropologists over the past half-century, it never really caught on as an interdisciplinary speciality like ethnobotany, ethnomusicology, and ethnomathematics. Pointing to the example of discord in the West between viewing psychoactive substances as (...) either “hallucinogens” or “entheogens,” I reassert ethnometaphysics in an aim to revamp the overlooked coining of this sub-field by anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell. Such a position rebrands SAC's alternative outlook in a way that could be seen by mainstream colleagues as less radical, thus giving the Society a more realistic opportunity to provoke progressive changes in the mainstream of our discipline. (shrink)

For more than 100 years, anthropologists have collected ethnographic research among communities who assert that the spirits, animal allies, and other entities of the unseen world are “really real,” yet we have historically contextualized this information under the umbrella of cultural relativism rather than taking the veracity of these claims seriously. In the last decade, some anthropologists claim that our discipline has finally undergone an ontological turn, which opens a door for anthropologists to finally take claims of nonhuman sentience seriously (...) under the umbrella of ontological, rather than cultural, relativism. This paper takes issue with ontological relativism as just one more frame for explaining away the stories of other-than-human consciousness that ethnographers report and suggests that there is an urgent need to consider the relevance, rather than the relativism, of other-than-human consciousness. It looks to Michael Harner's work as a welcome alternative to ontological relativism and encourages opening our minds to a reconsideration of what is “really real.”. (shrink)

Calling for an expanded framework of EuroAmerican science's methodology whose perspective acknowledges both quantitative/etic and qualitative/emic orientations is the broad focus of this article. More specifically this article argues that our understanding of shamanic and/or other related states of consciousness has been greatly enhanced through ethnographic methods, yet in their present form these methods fail to provide the means to fully comprehend these states. They fail, or are limited, because this approach is only a “cognitive interpretation” or “metanarrative” of the (...) actual experience and not the experience itself. Consequently this perspective is also limited because the researcher continues to assess his or her data through the lens of their symbolic constructs, thereby preventing them from truly experiencing shamanic and psi/spirit approaches to knowing since the data collection process does not “in and of itself” affect the observer. We, therefore, need expanded ethnographic methods that include within their approaches an understanding of methods and techniques to experientially encounter these states of consciousness—and become transformed by them. Our becoming transformed and then recollecting our ethnoautobiographical experiences is the means toward a new kind of science and its methods of inquiry that this article seeks to encourage. (shrink)

The anthropology of consciousness is a field of enormous and demanding scope. In this article, there is no attempt to address all of the current trends in thinking and research; rather, the aim was to draw a line through the field that extends from the 19th century and European philosophies to some contemporary expressions of those philosophies in social science research. In particular, taking the original project of Edmund Husserl, an approach to the phenomenological investigation of the nature of consciousness (...) and, in addition, states of consciousness is proposed in the form of “existential grammars.” The treatment is propaedeutic: The ideas presented here are part of an on-going, long-term project tied to cross-cultural and experimental research on consciousness. However, the short-term outcomes are promising in elucidating the foundational questions not only about consciousness but also about specific areas of interest such as healing and the nature of scientific investigation itself. One important direction in this work is to illuminate, where possible, the pre-reflective rationalities of human experience, of consciousness itself, in such a way that we might generate codes of consciousness ultimately not as the equivalent of genetic models, but as descriptors of the core matrix of consciousness out of which alterations of consciousness might be better understood. (shrink)

This paper defends an interventionist account of causation by construing this account as a contribution to methodology, rather than as a set of theses about the ontology or metaphysics of causation. It also uses the topic of causation to raise some more general issues about the relation between, on the one hand, methodology, and, on the other hand, ontology and metaphysics, as these are understood in contemporary philosophical discussion, particularly among so-called analytic metaphysicians. It concludes with the suggestion (...) that issues about the ontology of causation often can be fruitfully reconstrued as methodological proposals. (shrink)

There is growing debate about what is the correct methodology for research in the ontology of artworks. In the first part of this essay, I introduce my view: I argue that semantic descriptivism is a semantic approach that has an impact on meta-ontological views and can be linked with a hermeneutic fictionalist proposal on the meta-ontology of artworks such as works of music. In the second part, I offer a synthetic presentation of the four main positive meta-ontological views (...) that have been defended in philosophical literature about artworks and of some criticisms that can be lodged against them: Amie Thomasson’s global descriptivism, Andrew Kania’s local descriptivism, Julian Dodd’s folk-theoretic modesty, and David Davies’ rational accountability view. In the conclusion, I show the advantages of my view. (shrink)

The relationship between mathematical formalism, physical interpretation and epistemological appraisal in the practice of physical theorizing is considered in the context of Bohmian mechanics. After laying outthe formal mathematical postulates of thetheory and recovering the historical roots ofthe present debate over the meaning of Bohmianmechanics from the early debate over themeaning of Schrödinger's wave mechanics,several contemporary interpretations of Bohmianmechanics in the literature are discussed andcritiqued with respect to the aim of causalexplanation and an alternative interpretationis proposed. Throughout, the over-arching aimis (...) to exhibit the connections betweenmathematical, ontological and methodologicalquestions in physical theory and to reflect onthe rationality of physical theorizing in lightof the present case. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to offer insights that can help researchers to link ontology, epistemology and research methodology. This paper outlines the links among ontology, epistemology and research methodology by exploring ontological, epistemological and methodological perspectives in the research. It discusses how ontological and epistemological issues influence research methodology by providing a clear understanding for different research methodologies based on ontology and epistemology. Furthermore, attention is given to research aspects such as the elements of research (...) process, research philosophy, research approach, research strategy, the choice of method, and research design. (shrink)

Since 2002 we have been testing and refining a methodology for ontology development that is now being used by multiple groups of researchers in different life science domains. Gary Merrill, in a recent paper in this journal, describes some of the reasons why this methodology has been found attractive by researchers in the biological and biomedical sciences. At the same time he assails the methodology on philosophical grounds, focusing specifically on our recommendation that ontologies developed for scientific purposes should (...) be constructed in such a way that their terms are seen as referring to what we call universals or types in reality. As we show, Merrill’s critique is of little relevance to the success of our realist project, since it not only reveals no actual errors in our work but also criticizes views on universals that we do not in fact hold. However, it nonetheless provides us with a valuable opportunity to clarify the realist methodology, and to show how some of its principles are being applied, especially within the framework of the OBO (Open Biomedical Ontologies) Foundry initiative. (shrink)

In a series of papers over a period of several years Barry Smith andWerner Ceusters have offered a number of cogent criticisms of historical approaches to creating, maintaining, and applying biomedical terminologies and ontologies. And they have urged the adoption of what they refer to as a “realism-based” approach. Indeed, at times they insist that the realism-based approach not only offers clear advantages and a well-founded methodological basis for ontology development and evaluation, but that such a realist perspective is (...) in fact necessary for understanding and using terminologies and ontologies in science. -/- This paper explores a number of questions surrounding such claims, provides a careful characterization of the type of realism recommended by Smith and Ceusters, and evaluates the role that realism plays in the critiques and recommendations that they offer. The conclusion reached is that while Smith’s and Ceusters’ criticisms of prior practice in the treatment of ontologies and terminologies in medical informatics are often both perceptive and well founded, and while at least some of their own proposals demonstrate obvious merit and promise, none of this either follows from or requires the brand of realism that they propose. (shrink)

Scientific conflicts often stem from differences in the conceptual framework through which scientists view and understand their own field. In this chapter, I analyze the ontological and methodological assumptions of three traditions in evolutionary biology, namely, Ernst Mayr’s population thinking, the gene-centered view of the Modern Syn thesis, and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. Each of these frameworks presupposes a different account of "evolutionary causes," and this discrepancy prevents mutual understanding and objective evaluation in the recent contention surrounding the EES. From (...) this perspective, the chapter characterizes the EES research program as an attempt to introduce causal structures beyond genes as additional units of evolution, and compares its research methodology and objectives with those of the traditional MS framework. (shrink)

I investigate the widely held view that fundamental musical ontology should be descriptivist rather than revisionary, that is, that it should describe how we think about musical works, rather than how they are independently of our thought about them. I argue that if we take descriptivism seriously then, first, we should be sceptical of art-ontological arguments that appeal to independent metaphysical respectability; and, second, we should give ‘fictionalism’ about musical works—the theory that they do not exist—more serious consideration than (...) it is usually accorded. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Research on the human microbiome has gen- erated a staggering amount of sequence data, revealing variation in microbial diversity at the community, species (or phylotype), and genomic levels. In order to make this complexity more manageable and easier to interpret, new units—the metagenome, core microbiome, and entero- type—have been introduced in the scientific literature. Here, I argue that analytical tools and exploratory statisti- cal methods, coupled with a translational imperative, are the primary drivers of this new ontology. By reducing (...) the dimensionality of variation in the human microbiome, these new units render it more tractable and easier to interpret, and hence serve an important heuristic role. Nonetheless, there are several reasons to be cautious about these new categories prematurely ‘‘hardening’’ into natural units: a lack of constraints on what can be sequenced metagenomically, freedom of choice in taxonomic level in defining a ‘‘core microbiome,’’ typological framing of some of the concepts, and possible reification of statistical constructs. Finally, lessons from the Human Genome Project have led to a translational imperative: a drive to derive results from the exploration of microbiome variation that can help to articulate the emerging paradigm of per- sonalized genomic medicine (PGM). There is a tension between the typologizing inherent in much of this research and the personal in PGM. (shrink)

Recently there has been a rise in the application of concepts and methods from biological evolutionary theory to human cultures and societies where the aim is to explain these by describing them as population-level phenomena reducible to individual-level processes. I argue against this type of view by using Mesoudi's Cultural Evolution as a case study. I claim that Mesoudi’s ontological assumptions about cultures and societies are dubious and his methodological assumptions inadequate when it comes to addressing cultural and social phenomena. (...) A consequence is that this approach to studying culture is, at the very least, incomplete and of limited application. (shrink)

Research on the human microbiome has generated a staggering amount of sequence data, revealing variation in microbial diversity at the community, species (or phylotype), and genomic levels. In order to make this complexity more manageable and easier to interpret, new units—the metagenome, core microbiome, and enterotype—have been introduced in the scientific literature. Here, I argue that analytical tools and exploratory statistical methods, coupled with a translational imperative, are the primary drivers of this new ontology. By reducing the dimensionality of (...) variation in the human microbiome, these new units render it more tractable and easier to interpret, and hence serve an important heuristic role. Nonetheless, there are several reasons to be cautious about these new categories prematurely ‘‘hardening’’ into natural units: a lack of constraints on what can be sequenced metagenomically, freedom of choice in taxonomic level in defining a ‘‘core microbiome,’’ typological framing of some of the concepts, and possible reification of statistical constructs. Finally, lessons from the Human Genome Project have led to a translational imperative: a drive to derive results from the exploration of microbiome variation that can help to articulate the emerging paradigm of personalized genomic medicine (PGM). There is a tension between the typologizing inherent in much of this research and the personal in PGM. (shrink)

It is argued that methodological individualism entails a holism of the parts, as originally proposed by Jan Smuts (1926/1927), where (1) the properties of entities involved in explanation are inherent to their participation in the whole they constitute, and (2) the whole does not act as a separate cause, distinct from its parts. This holism of parts involves a non-positivist and non-reductionist epistemology that is consistent with the analytical decomposition of wholes into basic units as advocated by methodological individualism (MI) (...) for the social sciences. According to MI, social actors are the basic units of analysis, and their rational capacity (understood in a broad sense as a general—trans-situational—capacity of understanding) is an explanatory principle inherent in their social being. The epistemological and ontological incompatibilities between methodological individualism's holism of the parts and mainstream reductionist or non-reductionist physicalist approaches, as well as emergentist approaches of critical realism, may explain the misunderstanding of methodological individualism within Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This commentary introduces fascia, our bodily connective tissue, as a contribution to thinking body as process beyond mind–body dualisms. Research in the field of Fascia Studies has shown that fascias’ core qualities are shifting and sliding in tensional responsiveness and that its both/and tissue-and-system features challenge clear-cut definitions. Acknowledging these characteristics of human physiology in novel ways, and in particular fascia as our largest sensory organ, becomes relevant to ontologies, alterities and research methodologies emphasizing experience and transdisciplinarity. Importantly, the notion (...) is never to theorize fascia as model or metaphor but as quotidian processual responsive proposition. (shrink)

Web legal information retrieval systems need the capability to reason with the knowledge modeled by legal ontologies. Using this knowledge it is possible to represent and to make inferences about the semantic content of legal documents. In this paper a methodology for applying NLP techniques to automatically create a legal ontology is proposed. The ontology is defined in the OWL semantic web language and it is used in a logic programming framework, EVOLP+ISCO, to allow users to query the (...) semantic content of the documents. ISCO allows an easy and efficient integration of declarative, object-oriented and constraint-based programming techniques with the capability to create connections with external databases. EVOLP is a dynamic logic programming framework allowing the definition of rules for actions and events. An application of the proposed methodology to the legal web information retrieval system of the Portuguese Attorney General’s Office is described. (shrink)

Biomedical terminologies are focused on what is general, Electronic Health Records (EHRs) on what is particular, and it is commonly assumed that the step from the one to the other is unproblematic. We argue that this is not so, and that, if the EHR of the future is to fulfill its promise, then the foundations of both EHR architectures and biomedical terminologies need to be reconceived. We accordingly describe a new framework for the treatment of both generals and particulars in (...) biomedical information systems that is designed: 1) to provide new opportunities for the sharing and management of data within and between healthcare institutions, 2) to facilitate interoperability among different terminology and record systems, and thereby 3) to allow new kinds of reasoning with biomedical data. (shrink)

Naturalism, as I understand it, includes cosmological naturalism, ontological naturalism and methodological naturalism. After clarifying these three theses I argue that the combination of ontological with methodological naturalism is untenable. I do so by providing a pro tanto case against ontological naturalism and show that it can be resisted, but only by abandoning methodological naturalism. The pro tanto case is that ontological naturalism requires a version of what I call Redundancy Nominalism, but methodological naturalists should either reject it or at (...) very least treat it, and hence ontological naturalism, as a speculation. (shrink)

(2008). Meta-Linguistics: Methodology and Ontology in Devitt's Ignorance of Language. Australasian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 86, No. 4, pp. 643-656.

For a philosopher with an abiding interest in the nature of objective knowledge systems in science, what could be more important than trying to think in terms of those very subjects of such knowledge to which men like Galileo, Newton, Max Planck, Einstein and others devoted their entire lifetimes? In certain respects, these systems and their structures may not be beyond the grasp of a linguistic conception of science, and scientific change, which men of science and philosophy have advocated in (...) various forms in recent times. But certainly it is wrong-headed to think that one's conception of science can be based on an identification of its theories with languages in which they may be, my own alternatively, framed. There may be more than one place in book (1983: 87) where they may seem to get confused with each other, quite against my original intentiens. The distinction between the objec tive knowledge systems in science and the dynamic frameworks of the languages of the special individual sciences, in which their growth can be embedded in significant ways, assumes here, therefore, much impor tance. It must be recognized that the problems concerning scientific change, which these systems undergo, are not just problems concerning language change. (shrink)

This text is a presentation of the notion of ontological imagination. It constitutes an attempt to merge two traditions: critical sociology and science and technology studies - STS. By contrasting these two intellectual traditions, I attempt to bring together: a humanist ethical-political sensitivity and a posthumanist ontological insight. My starting point is the premise that contemporary world needs new social ontology and new critical theory based on it in order to overcome the unconsciously adapted, “slice-based” modernist vision of social (...) ontology. I am convinced that we need new ontological frameworks of the social combined with a research disposition which I refer to as ontological imagination. (shrink)

The widespread mistrust of metaphysics-the main obstacle to the unification of physics and philosophy-is based on the myth that metaphysical claims cannot be falsified or verified, because they are supposedly true independently of empirical knowledge. This is not true of metaphysical naturalism, whose approach is to critically reflect on the theories and findings of all the empirical disciplines and abstract from them a theory about such general features of reality that no single empirical discipline can be the authority on. Causation (...) is such a feature, since its instances include anything from planetary motions to particle interactions, chemical reactions, biological functions, and closing a door. Consequently, a general account of causation is beyond any particular empirical discipline. Metaphysical naturalism takes a meta-perspective on the results of the empirical sciences and attempts to figure out how it fits together in a coherent whole, e.g. by offering a general account of causation. General accounts of this kind are falsifiable in so far as the theories are falsifiable from which they are generalizations. The paper also discusses some fundamental metaphysical principles implicitly assumed by the sciences generally, and why they imply that unification is methodologically virtuous. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Exploring the Depth of Dream Experience: The Enactive Framework and Methods for Neurophenomenological Research” by Elizaveta Solomonova & Xin Wei Sha. Upshot: This commentary focuses on an ontological claim made by the authors of this target article: that perceiving, imagining and dreaming are inseparable. It explores how best to understand this “inseparability condition.” It is shown that the evidence needed to justify a strict reading of the inseparability condition is lacking, while there is room (...) for a more relaxed rendition of the inseparability condition. The inferred lesson is that in developing an enactive neurophenomenology of dreaming, it is a non-trivial task to achieve clarity about the ontology of dreaming, and its relationship to imagining as well as perceiving. (shrink)

In this article I examine “Ontology Matters!” (OM!) arguments. OM! arguments conclude that ontology can contribute to empirical success in social science. First, I capture the common form between different OM! arguments. Second, I describe quantifier variance as discussed in metaontology. Third, I apply quantifier variance to the common form of OM! arguments. I then present two ways in which ontology is prior to social science methodology, one realist and one pragmatic. I argue that a pragmatic interpretation (...) of ontology’s priority gives proponents of realist OM! arguments a special burden that they must meet to render their argument successful. (shrink)

This paper follows recent debates on the ontological turn in the social sciences and humanities to exemplify how this turn creates important openings of methodological and political potential in education. In particular, the paper makes an attempt to show two things: first, the new questions and possibilities that are opened from explicitly acknowledging the methodological and political consequences of the ontological turn in education—e.g. concerning agency, transformation, materiality and relations; and second, the importance of being clear about how educators and (...) educational researchers conceptualize ontology and engage with debates on the ontological turn in related disciplines. The paper sketches some of the methodological and political implications of the ontological turn for education, focusing in particular on the concept of learning. (shrink)

Ontology – the study of the most fundamental categories of being – lies at the very heart of metaphysics. The reason why it appears to be so central is because it takes on the following questions: What sorts of entities are there? What features do those entities have? How do they relate to one another? And so on. Section 1 of this Element presents a fast-paced historical overview of some of the notable approaches to these questions. Section 2 tells (...) the story of how one of the oldest, most disputed, but also most developed ontological categories – universals – got introduced. Section 3 builds on the discussion of universals as it considers the desiderata for a promising system of ontological categories. And Section 4 looks at ways in which philosophers might break with tradition and explore some new ontological categories. (shrink)

In the article, the author analyzes methodological approaches to the study of the concept of historical responsibility, comparing the German tradition of study with the voluntary actions ontology of M.M. Bakhtin 's. The German tradition, influenced by the thinking of World War II, emphasizes the perception of responsibility in the context of the relationship with guilt, which raises a substantial question about the nature of responsibility and its boundaries. In particular, H. Arendt formulates the concept of banality of evil, (...) focusing on the disappearance of internal perception of responsibility, but does not solve the question of the origins of such feeling. The Russian religious tradition, presented by M.M. Bakhtin, allows to propose a way to solve the issues raised due to the identification of ontological grounds of individual responsibility. Nevertheless, M.M. Bakhtin conclusions are also important for solving the problem of collective responsibility. Bakhtin addresses responsibility as an ontological characteristic of human existence, opposing its freedom. Responsibility manifests itself in acts, but ontologically precedes a separate action performed by a person. The role of the act is that it allows the person himself to understand the burden of responsibility and act on these prerequisites. The transfer of the Bakhtins methodology from individual to collective responsibility makes it possible to link the moment of its occurrence not to public recognition, but to the very fact of the individual 's entry into a certain community. The ontological integrity of the individual also acquires a social dimension, not only synchronic but also diachronic. According to the author, the application of the Bakhtins methodology in the field of social research makes it possible to consider problems of historical responsibility in the context of more fundamental philosophical questions about the relationship between individual and collective identity, the dynamics of identity, the combination of regularity and variability in human behavior. (shrink)

SummaryThe idea of interdisciplinarity can be articulated in different ways. The aim of the article is to criticise the view that interdisciplinarity is to be treated as a quality of the historian's approach to his subject-matter, and to argue for a constructivist interpretation of that notion. A constructivist account of interdisciplinarity relies on the thesis that the latter is one of the manifold ways in which it is possible to give sense to the historical records of which the historian wants (...) to gain knowledge. In the paper it is maintained that the function of the notion of interdisciplinarity is to account for the clash of languages that can be found when disciplines converge. This new paradigm is highlighted by taking into consideration the history of American pragmatism. (shrink)