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''Target Audience'': The course is open to all interested students with an undergraduate degree and some knowledge of philosophy. | ''Target Audience'': The course is open to all interested students with an undergraduate degree and some knowledge of philosophy. | ||
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== Preamble == | |||
Background Reading: [https://buffalo.box.com/v/Problems-w-analytic-Philosophy What's wrong with analytic philosophy?] | |||
The philosophical methodology that hnderlies this course produced Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), which was approved by the International Standards Organization in 2019 as standard ISO/IED 21838-2. | |||
A textual version of BFO is available [https://buffalo.app.box.com/v/BFO-2020-Supplementary-Files/file/647823963055 here]. | |||
This methodology includes principles such as: | |||
*the referent of every term should be traceable back to some portion of reality that is perceivable or physically identifiable | |||
*tracing back means: following paths of dependence (as a velocity, for instance, is dependent on some process of motion) | |||
We will collect examples of possible ways of doing philosophy constrained by BFO. For example, what do we do with information, given that there is no coverage of propositions in BFO? What do we do with modality given that BFO has no coverage of so-called possible worlds? | |||
We will explore one way in which using BFO and ontologies conformant to BFO can already be of benefit to philosophers, namely in tagging philosophical literature. How would one build out an ontology used to tag philosophical literature, since that literature is full of non-referring terms? How does the categorization strategy used by PhilPapers measure up to the standards of what would be needed by an ontology-grounded tagging system? | |||
''Proposed Topics for Papers'' | ''Proposed Topics for Papers'' | ||
Revision as of 14:46, 23 August 2020
Philosophy on Rails: An Introduction to Ontology
Special Topic PHI 579
Fall Semester 2020, Monday 1-3:40pm
Venue: Capen 240
Registration: Class#: 24202
Instructor: Barry Smith
Prerequisites: Open to all persons with an undergraduate degree and some knowledge of philosophy.
Office hours: By appointment via email at phismith@buffalo.edu
The Course
Course Description: Progress in philosophy has been hampered by the fact that philosophers have no shared, controlled vocabulary which they can use as a common starting point when defining their terms. Even mundane terms like ‘world’, ‘fact’, and ‘harm’ have such a variety of meanings that when competing theories use such terms their defenders can often be accused of talking past one another and of engaging in merely verbal disputes. This is in contrast to what is the case in the natural sciences, where consistent terminology – as codified for example in the Periodic Table and the International Standard System of Units – is recognized as indispensable. To put it bluntly, because of the use of standards, the natural sciences are collectively more successful than philosophers at resolving divergent points-of-view in their respective fields. Of course, the idea of developing a shared system of philosophical terms and definitions has been advanced in different forms already, for example by Aristotle in the Categories, by Leibniz in De Arte Combinatoria, by the early Wittgenstein, and by Carnap in his Logical Structure of the World. Similar methods are nowadays being successfully applied, but this is occurring primarily outside philosophy, in areas such as biomedical informatics and industrial engineering.
This course will address three goals:
- First, it will explore how to create and use a standard philosophical vocabulary. This will include exploiting modern developments in computational ontology, including the world’s first international standard ontology.
- Second, it will explore the ways in which building a restricted philosophical vocabulary can help to arbitrate philosophical disputes in areas such as time, mental content, modality, and obligation.
- Third, it will provide an introduction to the methods of contemporary applied ontological that are being used both inside and outside philosophy.
Course Structure: This is a three credit hour graduate seminar, with a practical exercise forming part of each class. The final session will be structured around youtube videos created by the students in the class. Students will be trained in the basic tools and methods of ontology, and become involved in the attempt to use BFO to capture data about philosophical methods, hypotheses and results.
Target Audience: The course is open to all interested students with an undergraduate degree and some knowledge of philosophy.
Preamble
Background Reading: What's wrong with analytic philosophy?
The philosophical methodology that hnderlies this course produced Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), which was approved by the International Standards Organization in 2019 as standard ISO/IED 21838-2.
A textual version of BFO is available here. This methodology includes principles such as:
- the referent of every term should be traceable back to some portion of reality that is perceivable or physically identifiable
- tracing back means: following paths of dependence (as a velocity, for instance, is dependent on some process of motion)
We will collect examples of possible ways of doing philosophy constrained by BFO. For example, what do we do with information, given that there is no coverage of propositions in BFO? What do we do with modality given that BFO has no coverage of so-called possible worlds?
We will explore one way in which using BFO and ontologies conformant to BFO can already be of benefit to philosophers, namely in tagging philosophical literature. How would one build out an ontology used to tag philosophical literature, since that literature is full of non-referring terms? How does the categorization strategy used by PhilPapers measure up to the standards of what would be needed by an ontology-grounded tagging system?
Proposed Topics for Papers
- Formalization of the content of any philosophical work, as for example in Charles Jarrett, "The Logical Structure of Spinoza's Ethics, Part I", Synthese, 37 (1), 1978
- How did Austin's military experience in WWII influence his mode of doing philosophy (Or: Can philosophy be performed through teamwork?)
- How can the Philpapers category system be improved?
- How can the rules for categorizing papers in Philpapers be improved?
- Formalizing the Amartya Sen/Martha Nussbaum ontology of capabilities
- In many cases papers would consist in presentations of ontologies or classifications or sets of formal or semi-formal definitions of philosophical relevant terms. Examples of the such classifications might be:
- 1. A classification of responses to the Gettier argument
- 2. A classification of (a) definitions of disease coupled with (b) proposed counterexamples for each disease-type.
- 3. A comprehensive catalogue of definitions of 'harm'
- 4. A comprehensive catalogue of definitions of causality
August 31: Introduction: Philosophy on Rails
Philosophy on Rails
Driverless Philosophy
Example: The Emotion Ontology
Readings
- Amanda Bryant, "Keep the chickens cooped: the epistemic inadequacy of free range metaphysics", Synthese 197 (5): 1867-1887. 2020.
Precursors
- Chisholm
- Ingarden
- Armstrong, D. M. Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics, Oxford University Press, 2010.
- BFO 2.0
September 7: The Ontology of Philosophy
Making the Content of Philosophy Accessible Systematically
Pierre Grenon and Barry Smith, “Foundations of an Ontology of Philosophy”, Synthese, 2011, 182 (2), 185-204.
Describes an ontology of philosophy that is designed to help navigation through philosophical literature, including literature in the form of encyclopedia articles and textbooks and in both printed and digital forms. The ontology is designed also to serve integration and structuring of data pertaining to the philosophical literature, and in the long term also to support reasoning about the provenance and contents of such literature, by providing a representation of the philosophical domain that is orientated around what philosophical literature is about.
Overview
Ontology of Philosophy
History of Philosophy
- Video 98 minutes
- Slides
- N. Milkov, A Logical–Contextual History of Philosophy, Southwest Philosophy Review 27 (1):21-29 (2011)
Examples of philosophical categorizations
- List of philpapers.org Categories
- Dimitris Gakis (2016) "Philosophy as Paradigms: An Account of a Contextual Metaphilosophical Perspective", Philosophical Papers, 45:1-2, 209-239.
- Eva Seidlmayer, An ontology of digital objects in philosophy
- Advancing beyond the PhilPapers Table of Categories
September 14: An Introduction to Basic Formal Ontology
The ISO Standardization Process
ISO/IEC 21838
Basic Formal Ontology
Robert Arp, Barry Smith and Andrew Spear, Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, August 2015.
September 21: Modes of Philosophical Derailment
- "... philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.” Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §38
- "... a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not a part of the mechanism." Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §271
- Karl Bühler on logical vs. material derailment (Entgleisung). See Mulligan here.
- Nosology of Continental Philosophy. See Mulligan here.
September 28: Philosophy of Science
- Models and simulations
October 5: Philosophical Logic
- Truth
October 12: Cognitive Science
- Mental Functioning Ontology
- Emotion Ontology
- Cognitive Process Ontology
October 19: Metaphysics
- Barry Smith and Werner Ceusters, "Ontological realism: A methodology for coordinated evolution of scientific ontologies", Applied Ontology, 2010 Nov 15; 5(3-4): 139–188.
October 26: Philosophy of Language
From Speech Acts to Document Acts
November 2: Social Ontology, Norms and Values
Deontic Entities in Basic Formal Ontology
November 9: Capabilities
- Capabilities
November 16: Philosophy of Information
- The Information Ontology
- Werner Ceusters and Barry Smith, "Aboutness: Towards Foundations for the Information Artifact Ontology", Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Biomedical Ontology (ICBO). CEUR vol. 1515. pp. 1-5 (2015).
November 23: Philosophy of Action
==November 30:
December 7: Student Projects (Remote Session)
1:00
Reading
Student Learning Outcomes
| Program Outcomes/Competencies | Instructional Method(s) | Assessment Method(s) |
|---|---|---|
| The student will acquire a knowledge of the principles and procedures of ontology, and an insight into the philosophical methods and theories relevant thereto. The student will also acquire a familiarity with research in formal philosophy and analytic metaphysics. | Lectures and class discussions | Review of reading matter and associated online content and participation in class discussions |
| The student will acquire experience in using the methods employed in applied ontology, including use of the Protége ontology editing software tool. | Participation in practical experiments | Review of results |
| The student will acquire experience in communicating the results of work using ontologies and in the potential of modern applied ontology as a tool to aid philosophical understanding | Creation of youtube presentation and of associated documentation | Review of results |
How to Write an Essay
Jordan Peterson's Essay Writing Guide
Important Dates
| Sep 20 | - about now start to discuss by email the content of your video and essay with Dr Smith |
| Sep 28 | - submit a proposed title and abstract |
| Oct 31 | - submit a table of contents and 300 word summary plus draft of associated ppt slides |
| Nov 27 | - submit penultimate draft of essay (~3000 words) and associated powerpoint (~10 slides) |
| Dec7 | - class presentation |
| Dec 11 | - submit final version of essay and powerpoint and upload final version of video to youtube |
Grading
Grading will be based on two factors:
I: understanding and criticism of the material presented in classes 1-13
All students are required to take an active part in class (and where relevant on-line) discussions throughout the semester.
II: preparation of a youtube video and associated documentation (including powerpoint slides and essay).
Content and structure of the essay should be discussed with Dr Smith. Where the essay takes the form of the documentation of a specific ontology developed by the student it should include:
- Statement of scope of the ontology
- Summary of existing ontologies in the relevant domain
- Explanation of how your ontology differs from (or incorporates) these ontologies
- Screenshots of parts of the ontology with some examples of important terms and definitions
- Summaries of potential applications of the ontology
Grading Policy: Grading follows standard Graduate School policies. Grades will be weighted according to the following breakdown:
Weighting Assignment
- 40% - class discussions
- 20% - youtube video presentation
- 20% - powerpoint slides
- 20% - essay / ontology content
Final Grades
Percentages refer to sum of assignment grades as listed above
Grade Quality Percentage
| A | 4.0 | 90.0% -100.00% |
| A- | 3.67 | 87.0% - 89.9% |
| B+ | 3.33 | 84.0% - 86.9% |
| B | 3.00 | 80.0% - 83.9% |
| B- | 2.67 | 77.0% - 79.9% |
| C+ | 2.33 | 74.0% - 76.9% |
| C | 2.00 | 71.0% - 73.9% |
| C- | 1.67 | 68.0% - 70.9% |
| D+ | 1.33 | 65.0% - 67.9% |
| D | 1.00 | 62.0% - 64.9% |
| F | 0 | 61.9% or below |
An interim grade of Incomplete (I) may be assigned if the student has not completed all requirements for the course. An interim grade of 'I' shall not be assigned to a student who did not attend the course. The default grade accompanying an interim grade of 'I' shall be 'U' and will be displayed on the UB record as 'IU.' The default Unsatisfactory (U) grade shall become the permanent course grade of record if the 'IU' is not changed through formal notice by the instructor upon the student's completion of the course.
Assignment of an interim 'IU' is at the discretion of the instructor. A grade of 'IU' can be assigned only if successful completion of unfulfilled course requirements can result in a final grade better than the default 'U' grade. The student should have a passing average in the requirements already completed. The instructor shall provide the student specification, in writing, of the requirements to be fulfilled.
The university’s Graduate Incomplete Policy can be found here.
Related Policies and Services
Academic integrity is a fundamental university value. Through the honest completion of academic work, students sustain the integrity of the university while facilitating the university's imperative for the transmission of knowledge and culture based upon the generation of new and innovative ideas. See http://grad.buffalo.edu/Academics/Policies-Procedures/Academic-Integrity.html.
Accessibility resources: If you have any disability which requires reasonable accommodations to enable you to participate in this course, please contact the Office of Accessibility Resources in 60 Capen Hall, 645-2608 and also the instructor of this course during the first week of class. The office will provide you with information and review appropriate arrangements for reasonable accommodations, which can be found on the web here.
