Advances in genetic research have created the need to inform consumers. Yet, the communication of hereditary risk and of the options for how to deal with it is a difficult task. Due to the abstract nature of genetics, people tend to overestimate or underestimate their risk. This paper addresses the issue of how to communicate risk information on hereditary breast and ovarian cancer through an online application. The core of the paper illustrates the design of OPERA, a risk assessment instrument (...) that applies the UK National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence's guidelines on the basis of (i) the number of relatives on the same side of the family with the same cancer or cancers that are known to run together; (ii) the ages of these relatives at diagnosis and (iii) the closeness of the family relationship with the person who is doing the assessment. By relying on the argumentation theory, we explain how the communication strategy that OPERA implements is essentially based on Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's deductive argumentation by association. By using as premises “facts” (propositions about reality that can be assumed without further justification) and “truths” (propositions that make connections about facts), OPERA delivers its claims with an ex auctoritate causal link aimed at transferring the audience's acceptance of the cause to the effect. Overall, the design of OPERA rests on its capacity to induce users' active processing of risk information through an appeal to their reasoning faculty. In the conclusion, we present some results from a pilot evaluation of users' acceptance of OPERA. (shrink)

This article holds that ability to support one’s opinions with arguments, awareness of the arguments for other opinions, and insight into the superiority of some arguments are basic requirements for rational discourse. Based on a content analysis of Swiss Italian newspaper coverage of a controversy over a smoke-free law introduced and finally implemented in the canton of Ticino in 2007 and on a five-wave panel survey of public opinion on the issue, the article describes elements of the argumentative structure of (...) news coverage of this issue and relates them to rationality requirements. It finds that the newspapers offered a wide variety of arguments to readers (articulation function) when political activity to introduce a ban intensified, and especially when arguments mattered as a referendum approached. Papers displayed a reasonable and differentiated picture of arguments, contributing to a unique pattern of weighting and evaluating them. Neither newspaper coverage nor public opinion showed much sign of change, which speaks against a reaction to superior arguments. Finally, the newspaper bias towards arguments for the ban and their inclination to publish objections to arguments against may have contributed to a widespread lack of awareness of arguments against the ban among people favouring it. Thus, evidence of the rationality of argumentative structures is mixed, and further enquiry into this subject is encouraged. (shrink)

Im vorliegenden Buch wird versucht, im Rahmen der allgemeinen Pädagogik aus philosophisch-pädagogischer Perspektive in Anwendung der historisch-kritischen und hermeneutisch-verstehenden Methode die ursprünglichen Lehren des Konfuzius und des So krates aus dem Konfuzianismus und aus dem Sokratismus annähernd herauszuarbeiten, um sie im Hinblick auf den Zusammenhang von Fremderziehung und Selbsterziehung des Menschen im Sinne einer Entwicklung zu befragen. Aus den Untersuchungen ergibt sich, daß die jeweiligen Inbegriffe der Lehren des Konfuzius und des Sokrates, die des "Lernens" und des "Philosophierens", als Selbsterziehung (...) des einzelnen Menschen bezeichnet werden können und daß die Selbsterziehung des einzelnen Menschen in beiden Lehren seine authentische Fremderziehung zur Voraussetzung hat. Das jeweilige Ziel der Lehren des Konfuzius und des Sokrates im Hinblick auf die Selbsterziehung des einzelnen Menschen im Sinne der Weiterentwicklung seiner authentischen Fremderziehung bzw. im Sinne seines selbständigen und selbstkritischen Lebensweges ist die Menschlichkeit (ren) und die Trefflichkeit (Arete). Kennzeichen der bewußten Lebensform der Selbsterziehung des einzelnen Menschen ist in beiden Lehren die Erfahrung innerer Freiheit und innerer Zufriedenheit, die dem einzelnen Menschen durch seine Selbsterziehung zuteil wird. (shrink)

Im vorliegenden Buch wird versucht, im Rahmen der allgemeinen Pädagogik aus philosophisch-pädagogischer Perspektive den Zusammenhang von Phronesis (denkender Umsicht) und Sophia (Weisheit), wie er von Aristoteles in seiner Nikomachischen Ethik dargestellt wird, zu erklären. Die Untersuchungen ergeben, daß die Phronesis (die denkende Umsicht), die auf die ethischen Trefflichkeiten in Theorie und Praxis ausgerichtet ist, als Selbsterziehung des einzelnen Menschen umschrieben werden kann und zum Ziel seine Weisheit im Sinne einer Dimension hat, die durch die Begriffe der Glückseligkeit (Eudaimonia) und der (...) geistigen Schau (Theoria) verdeutlicht wird. Die ethische Theorie des Aristoteles, die in den Gedanken der Nikomachischen Ethik wesentlich zum Ausdruck kommt und die aus philosophisch-pädagogischer Perspektive die existentielle Lebensform der Selbsterziehung des einzelnen Menschen thematisiert, kann - zusammengenommen mit der ethischen Theorie von Immanuel Kant - als eine der beiden bedeutendsten ethischen Theorien der abendländischen Geschichte angesehen werden und dürfte nicht nur heute, sondern auch in Zukunft weiterhin Relevanz haben, und zwar für das Handeln des einzelnen Menschen im Hinblick auf sich selbst und in Beziehung auf die anderen Menschen, und damit einen Sinnhorizont für den einzelnen Menschen im Hinblick auf sein Leben anbieten. (shrink)

This paper throws some light on the nature of argumentation, its use and advantages, within the setting of doctor–patient interaction. It claims that argumentation can be used by doctors to offer patients reasons that work as ontological conditions for enhancing the decision making process, as well as to preserve the institutional nature of their relationship with patients. In support of these claims, selected arguments from real-life interactions are presented in the second part of the paper, and analysed by means of (...) a model of argumentation borrowed from classical rhetoric, and refined according to the modern orientation of the pragma-dialectic approach. (shrink)

Many philosophers appeal to intuitions to support some philosophical views. However, there is reason to be concerned about this practice as scientific evidence has documented systematic bias in philosophically relevant intuitions as a function of seemingly irrelevant features (e.g., personality). One popular defense used to insulate philosophers from these concerns holds that philosophical expertise eliminates the influence of these extraneous factors. Here, we test this assumption. We present data suggesting that verifiable philosophical expertise in the free will debate-as measured by (...) a reliable and validated test of expert knowledge-does not eliminate the influence of one important extraneous feature (i.e., the heritable personality trait extraversion) on judgments concerning freedom and moral responsibility. These results suggest that, in at least some important cases, the expertise defense fails. Implications for the practice of philosophy, experimental philosophy, and applied ethics are discussed. (shrink)

Understanding causal structure is a central task of human cognition. Causal learning underpins the development of our concepts and categories, our intuitive theories, and our capacities for planning, imagination and inference. During the last few years, there has been an interdisciplinary revolution in our understanding of learning and reasoning: Researchers in philosophy, psychology, and computation have discovered new mechanisms for learning the causal structure of the world. This new work provides a rigorous, formal basis for theory theories of concepts and (...) cognitive development, and moreover, the causal learning mechanisms it has uncovered go dramatically beyond the traditional mechanisms of both nativist theories, such as modularity theories, and empiricist ones, such as association or connectionism. (shrink)

According to a suggestion by Williamson, outright belief comes in degrees: one has a high/low degree of belief iff one is willing to rely on the content of one’s belief in high/low-stakes practical reasoning. This paper develops an epistemic norm for degrees of outright belief so construed. Starting from the assumption that outright belief aims at knowledge, it is argued that degrees of belief aim at various levels of strong knowledge, that is, knowledge which satisfies particularly high epistemic standards. This (...) account is contrasted with and shown to be superior to an alternative proposal according to which higher degrees of outright belief aim at higher-order knowledge. In an “Appendix”, it is indicated that the logic of degrees of outright belief is closely linked to ranking theory. (shrink)

According to the knowledge norm of belief, one should believe p only if one knows p. However, it can easily seem that the ordinary notion of belief is much weaker than the knowledge norm would have it. It is possible to rationally believe things one knows to be unknown The aim of belief, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). One response to this observation is to develop a technical notion of ‘outright’ belief. A challenge for this line of response is to (...) find a way of getting a grip on the targeted notion of belief. In order to meet this challenge, I characterize ‘outright’ belief in this paper as the strongest belief state implied by knowledge. I show that outright belief so construed allows this notion to play important theoretical roles in connection with knowledge, assertion and action. (shrink)

Many languages allow for “fake” uses of their past tense marker: the marker: can occur in certain contexts without conveying temporal pastness. Instead it appears to bear a modal meaning. Iatridou :231–270, 2000) has dubbed this phenomenon Fake Tense. Fake Tense is particularly common to conditional constructions. This paper analyzes Fake Tense in English conditional sentences as a certain kind of ambiguity: the past tense morphology can mark the presence of a temporal operator, but it can also signal a specific (...) modal operator. The ambiguity is proposed to be the result of recategorization: the Simple Past develops a second, modal meaning because of structural similarities between the temporal and the modal/epistemic domain. The proposal is spelled out in the generative semantics framework, using the restrictor approach to conditionals Semantics from different points of view, 1979; in: A. von Stechow and D. Wunderlich Semantics: an international handbook of contemporary research, 1991), and building on von Stechows et al.’s recent work on the English tense system The expression of time in language, 2010; Romero and von Stechow, Tense: introduction, 2008). (shrink)

Three facts are widely thought to be key to the characterization of human cognitive uniqueness (though a number of other factors are often cited as well): (a) humans are sophisticated cultural learners; (b) humans often rely on mental states with rich representational contents; and (c) humans have the ability and disposition to make and use tools. This article argues that (a)–(c) create a positive feedback loop: Sophisticated cultural learning makes possible the manufacture of tools that increase the sophistication of representational (...) decision-making, which in turn allows for yet further increases in the sophistication of cultural learning and tool manufacture. (shrink)

Landgrebe and Smith provide an argument for the impossibility of Artificial General Intelligence based on the limits of simulating complex systems. However, their argument presupposes a very contemporary vision of artificial intelligence as a model trained on data to produce an algorithm executable in a modern digital computing system. The present contribution explores what it means to be artificial. Current artificial intelligence approaches on modern computing systems are not the only conceivable way in which artificial intelligence technology might be created. (...) If there are conceivable routes by which an artificial intelligence might be developed that are not constrained in the same way as the current generation of artificial neural networks, then these might be plausible routes towards the engineered generation of artificial general intelligence that are not precluded by the Landgrebe and Smith argument against the possibility of artificial general intelligence. (shrink)

This paper studies degrees of doxastic justification. Dependency relations among different beliefs are represented in terms of causal models. Doxastic justification, on this picture, is taken to run causally downstream along appropriate causal chains. A theory is offered which accounts for the strength of a derivative belief in terms of (i) the strength of the beliefs on which it is based, and (ii) the epistemic quality of the belief-forming mechanisms involved. It is shown that the structure of degrees of justification (...) converges to ranking theory under ideal conditions. (shrink)

This book is the first systematic treatment of the philosophy of science underlying evolutionary economics. It does not advocate an evolutionary approach towards economics, but rather assesses the epistemic value of appealing to evolutionary biology in economics more generally. The author divides work in evolutionary economics into three distinct, albeit related, forms: a structural form, an evidential form, and a heuristic form. He then analyzes five examples of work in evolutionary economics falling under these three forms. For the structural form, (...) he examines the parallelism between natural selection and economic decision making, and the parallelism between natural selection and market competition. For the evidential form, he looks at the relationship between animal and human economic decision making, and the evolutionary explanation of diversity in human economic decision making. Finally, for the heuristic form, he focuses on the plausibility of equilibrium modeling in evolutionary ecology and economics. In this way, he shows that linking evolutionary biology and economics can make for a powerful methodological tool that can enable progress in our understanding of various economics questions. Structure, Evidence, and Heuristic will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, evolutionary biology, and economics. (shrink)

Effective public policy to mitigate climate change footprints should build on data-driven analysis of firm-level strategies. This article’s conceptual approach augments the resource-based view of the firm and identifies investments in four firm-level resource domains to develop capabilities in climate change impact mitigation. The authors denote the resulting framework as the GISTe model, which frames their analysis and public policy recommendations. This research uses the 2008 Carbon Disclosure Project database, with high-quality information on firm-level climate change strategies for 552 companies (...) from North America and Europe. In contrast to the widely accepted myth that European firms are performing better than North American ones, the authors find a different result. Many firms, whether European or North American, do not just “talk” about climate change impact mitigation, but actually do “walk the talk.” European firms appear to be better than their North American counterparts in “walk I,” denoting attention to governance, information management, and systems. But when it comes down to “walk II,” meaning actual Technology-related investments, North American firms’ performance is equal or superior to that of the European companies. The authors formulate public policy recommendations to accelerate firm-level, sector-level, and cluster-level implementation of climate change strategies. (shrink)

I critically discuss a recent innovation in the debate surrounding the plausibility of rational choice theory : the appeal to evolutionary theory. Specifically, I assess Gigerenzer and colleagues’ claim that considerations based on natural selection show that, instead of making decisions in a RCT-like way, we rely on ‘simple heuristics’. As I try to make clearer here, though, Gigerenzer and colleagues’ arguments are unconvincing: we lack the needed information about our past to determine whether the premises on which they are (...) built are true—and, hence, we cannot tell whether they, in fact, speak against RCT. (shrink)

Problems in normative ethics paradigmatically concern what it is obligatory or permissible for an individual to do. Yet sometimes, each of us ought to do something individually in virtue of what we ought to do together. Unfortunately, traversing these two different levels at which a moral obligation can arise – individual and collective – is fraught with difficulties that easily lure us into conclusions muddying our understanding of collective obligations. This paper seeks to clearly lay out a systematic problem central (...) to the relation between collective and individual duties in view of alleviating some such confusion and facilitating more concerted attempts at resolving it: Collective duties require individuals to act in order for the collective duty to be fulfilled. Yet typically, a collective duty does not entail any one set of individual duties that would prescribe such contributory actions: The work we need to do in order to fulfil a duty can be allocated differently to the individuals collectively bearing it. Much like in matters of distributive justice, then, deriving individual duties from a collective one requires us to employ a distributive scheme, which raises separate normative concerns that have rarely taken centre stage in the debate so far. (shrink)

Quine challenged traditional views of the a priori by appealing to two key premises: that any statement may be held true “come what may” and that no statement is immune to revision in light of new experience. Chalmers has recently developed a seemingly compelling response to each of these claims. The critique is particularly threatening because it seems to rest on the Bayesian premise that upon acquiring evidence E, a rational agent will update her credence in any statement S to (...) equal her prior conditional credence in S given E. We argue that Chalmers’s criticisms misfire. When properly understood, Quine’s two theses are largely consistent with Bayesianism. (shrink)

Unconscious stimuli can influence participants’ motor behavior but also more complex mental processes. Recent research has gradually extended the limits of effects of unconscious stimuli. One field of research where such limits have been proposed is spatial cueing, where exogenous automatic shifts of attention have been distinguished from endogenous controlled processes which govern voluntary shifts of attention. Previous evidence suggests unconscious effects on mechanisms of exogenous shifts of attention. Here, we applied a cue-priming paradigm to a spatial cueing task with (...) arbitrary cues by centrally presenting a masked symmetrical prime before every cue stimulus. We found priming effects on response times in target discrimination tasks with the typical dynamic of cue-priming effects indicating that central symmetrical stimuli which have been associated with endogenous orienting can modulate shifts of spatial attention even when they are masked. Prime–Cue Congruency effects of perceptual dissimilar prime and cue stimuli suggest that these effects cannot be entirely reduced to perceptual repetition priming of cue processing. In addition, priming effects did not differ between participants with good and poor prime recognition performance consistent with the view that unconscious stimulus features have access to processes of endogenous shifts of attention. (shrink)

The present paper argues that, despite appearance to the contrary, Kierkegaard’s writings offer promising argumentational resources for addressing the problem of evil. According to Kierkegaard, however, in order to make use of these resources at all, one must necessarily be willing to shift the battleground, so to speak: from a third- to a genuine first-person perspective, namely the perspective of what Climacus dubs Religiousness A. All (yet also only) those who seek deliberate self-annihilation before God—a God in relation to whom (...) they perceive themselves always in the wrong—shall discover the ideal that an unwavering and in fact unconditional thankfulness (namely, for being forgiven) is to be considered the only appropriate attitude towards God and as such both necessary and sufficient for coming to terms with evil and suffering, at least in the life of someone making that discovery. I will argue that Kierkegaard’s (non-)pseudonymous writings provide reasons, at times unwittingly, for adopting the perspective of Religiousness A; however, I will also and ultimately argue that the principle of infinite thankfulness as a corollary of that perspective flounders when it comes to making sense of (the eschatological implications of) the suffering of others. (shrink)

According to a prominent thought, in one’s practical reasoning one should rely only on what one knows. Yet for many choices, the relevant information is uncertain. This has led Schiffer to the following objection: oftentimes, we are fully rational in reasoning from uncertain premises which we do not know. For example, we may decide to take an umbrella based on a 0.4 credence that it will rain. There are various ways proponents of a knowledge norm for practical reasoning can respond. (...) One option is to say that the right way of dealing with uncertain information requires knowledge of probabilities. Another option is to say that credences can be knowledge because they really are beliefs with an unusual kind of content that consists of a set of probability spaces. Mixed accounts are possible as well. On neither of the accounts in the literature, however, can reasoning from uncertain premises be taken as reasoning based on a graded attitude, a credence, toward an ordinary proposition. To make room for this possibility, I argue that reliance comes in degrees. The knowledge norm is only plausible when taken to be concerned with full reliance.Partial reliance, on the other hand, goes hand in hand with credence. (shrink)

ObjectiveThe use of nanotechnologies is important to reduce environmental health problems in Iran, so the present study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of nanotechnologies in environmental health. This is a cross-sectional descriptive study for 11-year periods (2008–2018) on all articles published in three specialized journals of environmental health with emphasis on the use of nanotechnologies in various fields of environmental health (water, air, sewage, waste, food, radiation, etc).ResultsIn this study, 774 articles related to 114 issues of 3 specialized environmental (...) health journals were reviewed. A review of 774 articles showed that 80 articles (10.3%) were published in the field of nanotechnologies. Out of 80 articles published in the field of nanotechnology, 66 articles (82.5%) were published on the subject of water, 9 articles (11.3%) on wastewater and 5 articles (6.2%) on air pollution. Subject review of articles showed that articles using carbon nanotubes to remove natural organic pollutants, surfactants, hydroxybenzenes, phenol, dimethyl phthalates, use of titanium dioxide nanoparticles, iron-magnesium nanoparticles for wastewater treatment, Silver nanoparticles were used to remove air pollution. The results showed that published articles on nanotechnology in the field of environmental health were few. (shrink)

We argue that there are two different kinds of altruistic motivation: classical psychological altruism, which generates ultimate desires to help other organisms at least partly for those organisms’ sake, and nonclassical psychological altruism, which generates ultimate desires to help other organisms for the sake of the organism providing the help. We then argue that classical psychological altruism is adaptive if the desire to help others is intergenerationally reliable and, thus, need not be learned. Nonclassical psychological altruism is adaptive when the (...) desire to help others is adaptively learnable. This theory opens new avenues for the interdisciplinary study of psychological altruism. (shrink)

The article critically engages Menachem Fisch’s account of normative frameworks, in particular of (rational) transitions between them. I argue, first, that exposure to the normative criticism leveled at us by other human beings is indeed “capable of destabilizing normative commitment” to one’s own underlying framework beliefs and standards, as Fisch holds; however, closer scrutiny reveals that such exposure is neither sufficient nor necessary but rather accidental in this respect. Second, I will try to show that Søren Kierkegaard’s account of how (...) people fundamentally change their mind provides resources for both a substantial critique of Fisch and a more adequate understanding of the transitions in question. The article argues, third, that Fisch’s framework model – though meaningful, in fact heuristically indispensable in and as of itself – has robust transcendental implications which as such are being ignored, if not directly denied by Fisch and, precisely by being ignored or denied, unnecessarily weaken the overall plausibility of his account. Finally, and ex post, I will address an important objection raised by some commentators. (shrink)

Analyses of so-called ‘post-truth’ discourse in populist politics have so far largely focussed on sorting it into cases of lying, bullshitting, bubble-like epistemic constraints, or alternative epistemic norms flouting objective truth. We review these proposals and point out problems with each. Some scholars, however, have recently drawn attention to how apparent assertions of facts in these contexts seem to be functionally entangled with expressing or affirming social identities. To get a clearer picture of what such an explanation might amount to, (...) we differentiate four different ways in which social identities might be connected to apparently assertive discourse: signalling, expressive affirmation, dissonance reduction, and identity grounding. Distinguishing and deciding among these will matter not only for providing an accurate analysis of post-truth discourse, but also for determining the exact grounds on which it merits criticism and for what might be done about it. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate whether timing in monolingual acquisition interacts with age of onset and input effects in child bilingualism. Six different morpho-syntactic and semantic phenomena acquired early, late or very late are considered, with their timing in L1 acquisition varying between age 3 (subject-verb agreement) and after age 6 (case marking). Data from simultaneous bilingual children (2L1) whose mean age of onset to German was three months are compared with data from early second language learners of German (eL2) (...) whose mean age of onset to German was 35 months as well as with data from monolingual children. To explore change over time, children were tested twice at the ages of 4;4 years and 5;8 years. The main findings were that 2L1 children had an advantage over their eL2 peers in early acquired phenomena, which disappeared with time, whereas in late acquired phenomena 2L1 and eL2 children did not differ. Moreover, 2L1 children performed like monolingual children in early acquired phenomena but had a disadvantage in the late acquired phenomena with the amount of delay decreasing with time. We conclude that age of onset effects are modulated by effects of timing in monolingual acquisition. Contrary to expectation, input in terms of language dominance, measured as the dominant language used at home, did not affect simultaneous bilingual children’s performance in any of the phenomena. We discuss the implications of our findings for the hypothesis that acquisition of late phenomena is determined by input alone and suggest an alternative concept: the learner’s internal need for time to master a phenomenon, which is determined by its complexity and cross-linguistic robustness. (shrink)

A possible event always seems to be more probable than an impossible event. Although this constraint, usually alluded to as regularity , is prima facie very attractive, it cannot hold for standard probabilities. Moreover, in a recent paper Timothy Williamson has challenged even the idea that regularity can be integrated into a comparative conception of probability by showing that the standard comparative axioms conflict with certain cases if regularity is assumed. In this note, we suggest that there is a natural (...) weakening of the standard comparative axioms. It is shown that these axioms are consistent both with the regularity condition and with the essential feature of Williamson’s example. (shrink)

Ernst Haeckel formulated his biogenetic law, famously stating that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, in 1872. The Russian evolutionist Alexei Sewertzoff, and the Swiss-born zoologist Adolf Naef were among those who revised Haeckel’s law, thus changing the course of evolutionary theory and of developmental biology. Although Sewertzoff and Naef approached the problem in a similar way and formulated similar hypotheses at a purely descriptive level, their theoretical viewpoints were crucially different. While Sewertzoff laid the foundations for a Darwinian evolutionary morphology and is (...) regarded as a forerunner of the modern synthesis, Naef was one of the most important figures in “idealistic morphology”, which is usually seen as a type of anti-Darwinism. Both Naef and Sewertzoff aimed to revise Haeckel’s biogenetic law and came to comparable conclusions at the empirical level. This paper is an attempt to explain how their fundamentally different theoretical backgrounds influenced their views on the relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag stellt eine differenzierungstheoretische Perspektive auf Sportbeteiligung und Sportinteresse der Erwachsenenbevölkerung vor. Zugrunde liegen empirische Daten aus einer eigenen repräsentativen Bevölkerungsumfrage in Deutschland vom Herbst 2003, in der die Inklusion der Erwachsenen in sämtliche gesellschaftlichen Teilsysteme ermittelt wurde. Die Inklusion in den Sport wird mit Bezug auf die sekundäre Leistungsrolle des Breitensportlers und die Publikumsrolle des Sportzuschauers betrachtet; sodann wird möglichen Zusammenhängen zwischen der Ausprägung der Inklusion in den Sport mit ungleichheitstheoretisch geläufigen Merkmalen sozialer Lage, darüber hinaus dann (...) auch mit der Ausprägung anderer Inklusionsverhältnisse nachgegangen. (shrink)

Several authors have recently argued that the excessive focus on equilibrium models in mainstream economic analysis prevents economists from providing accurate representations of the complex and dynamic nature of real economic systems. In response, this paper argues the following. Many economic systems are the products of deliberate and centralized human design. People can and do build and support structures, such as social institutions, aiming to enhance the predictability of economic systems, and thus to move them toward being equilibrium systems. This (...) provides a reason to think that many economic systems can be represented by equilibrium models. (shrink)

Background: SNOMED CT is a large terminology system designed to represent all aspects of healthcare. Its current form and content result from decades of bottom-up evolution. Due to SNOMED CT’s formal descriptions, it can be considered an ontology. The Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a foundational ontology that proposes a small set of disjoint, hierarchically ordered classes, supported by relations and axioms. In contrast, as a typical top-down endeavor, BFO was designed as a foundational framework for domain ontologies in the (...) natural sciences and related disciplines. Whereas it is mostly assumed that domain ontologies should be created as extensions of foundational ontologies, a post-hoc harmonization of consolidated domain ontologies in use, such as SNOMED CT, is known to be challenging. Methods: We explored the feasibility of harmonizing SNOMED CT with BFO, with a focus on the SNOMED CT Clinical Finding hierarchy. With more than 100,000 classes, it accounts for about one third of SNOMED CT’s content. In particular, we represented typical SNOMED CT finding/disorder concepts using description logics under BFO. Three representational patterns were created and the logical entailments analyzed. Results: Under a first scrutiny, the clinical intuition that diseases, disorders, signs and symptoms form a homogeneous ontological upper-level class appeared incompatible with BFO’s upper-level distinction into continuants and occurrents. The Clinical finding class seemed to be an umbrella for all kinds of entities of clinical interest, such as material entities, processes, states, dispositions, and qualities. This suggests the conclusion that Clinical finding would not be a suitable upper-level class from an BFO perspective. On closer inspection of the taxonomic links within this hierarchy and the implicit meaning derived thereof, it became clear that Clinical finding classes do not characterize the entity (e.g. a fracture, allergy, tumor, pain, hemorrhage, seizure, fever) in a literal sense but rather the condition of a patient having that fracture, allergy, pain etc. This gives sense to the current characteristic of the Clinical Finding hierarchy, in which complex classes are modeled as subclasses of their constituents. Most of these taxonomic links are inferred, as the consequence of the ‘role group’ design pattern, which is ubiquitous in SNOMED CT and has often been subject of controversy regarding its semantics. Conclusion: Our analyses resulted in the proposal of (i) equating SNOMED CT’s ‘role group’ property with the reflexive and transitive BFO relation ‘has occurrent part’; and (ii) reinterpreting Clinical Findings as Clinical Occurrents, i.e. temporally extended entities in an organism, having one or more occurrents as temporal parts that occur in continuants. This re-interpretation was corroborated by a manual analysis of classes under Clinical Finding, as well as the identification of similar modeling patterns in other ontologies. As a result, SNOMED CT does not require any content redesign to establish compatibility with BFO, apart from this re-interpretation, and a suggested re-labeling. Regarding the feasibility of harmonizing terminologies with principled foundational ontologies post-hoc, our results provide support to the assumption that this does not necessarily require major redesign efforts, but rather a careful analysis of the implicit assumptions of terminology curators and users. (shrink)