Browsing by Subject "ontology"

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    The Use of Ontologies to Accelerate the Behavioral Sciences: Promises and Challenges
    (Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2023-10-01) Sharp, C; Kaplan, RM; Strauman, TJ
    Behavioral scientists produce a vast amount of research every year yet struggle to produce cumulative knowledge that is easily translated in applied settings. This article summarizes a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine consensus report on the development and use of ontologies to accelerate the behavioral sciences. The report examines key challenges in the behavioral and psychological sciences motivating an evaluation of ontology use and development in the behavioral sciences. The advantages of ontologies, including enhanced organization and retrieval of research evidence, improved scientific communication, reduction of duplication, and enhanced scientific replicability, are highlighted. Challenges that may impede the development and use of ontologies in the behavioral sciences are also considered. The article concludes with future directions for fulfilling the promise of ontologies to accelerate the behavioral and psychological sciences.
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    Words Arranged Thesiswise (A Defense of Mereological Nihilism)
    (2023-04-24) Shenot, Julia
    As part of what may be called our common sense, intuition, universal belief, or folk ontology, we hold certain ordinary objects like chairs, ships, and ourselves to exist. Some potential objects, on the other hand, do not exist. What is our rule for determining when parts compose a whole? Any common-sensical restricted mereological theory introduces various metaphysical problems, especially those surrounding vagueness and causal redundancy. The best solution to these problems is adopting mereological nihilism. Nihilism asserts that only simples, or partless objects, exist and ordinary objects are nothing more than arrangements of simples. It is coherent with our folk ontology, which is correct in the ordinary sense but untrue in the fundamental sense. Nihilism simplifies metaphysics in various ways and solves many problems and paradoxes surrounding ordinary objects. Nihilism’s biggest philosophical problem is that it entails that humans and organisms don’t exist (at least if they are material objects), and we generally take our own existence as knowable a priori. Organicism holds that organisms are the only composite objects and may be an attractive alternative, but nihilism remains plausible.