Cross jurisdictional collaboration efforts and emergency vaccine plans that are consistent with Tribal sovereignty are essential to public health emergency preparedness. The widespread adoption of clearly written federal, state, and local vaccine plans that address fundamental assumptions in vaccine distribution to Tribal nations is imperative for future pandemic response.

Negative entities such as holes, cavities, and shadows are metaphysically puzzling. Despite evidence supporting their existence, their nature as absences of positive entities raises questions about their ontological status. How can negative beings exist while differing fundamentally from positive entities? To address this issue, Kris McDaniel’s ontological pluralism offers a solution by granting negative entities “being by courtesy.” This paper reviews McDaniel’s proposal, presents a challenge to it, and offers an alternative solution within the framework of ontological pluralism. The conclusion (...) addresses an objection and provides a response, contributing to the ongoing debate about the metaphysical reality of negative entities. (shrink)

The concept of mental representation has long been considered to be central concept of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. But not everyone agrees. Neo-behaviorists aim to explain the mind without positing any representations. My aim here is not to assess the merits and demerits of neo-behaviorism, but to take their challenge seriously and ask the question: What justifies the attribution of representations to an agent? Both representationalists and neo-behaviorists tend to take it for granted that the real question about (...) representations is whether we should be realist about the theory of representationalism. This paper is an attempt to shift the emphasis from the debate concerning realism about theories to the one concerning realism about entities. My claim is that regardless of whether we are realist about representational theories of the mind, we have compelling reasons to endorse entity realism about mental representations. (shrink)

Entity realism is the view that ‘a good many theoretical entities do really exist’. The main novelty of entity realism was that it provided an account of scientific realism that did not have to endorse realism about theories—the general proposal was that entity realism is noncommittal about whether we should be realist about scientific theories. I argue that the only way entity realists can resist the pull of straight scientific realism about theories is by endorsing a (...) recent new player in the scientific realism debate: singularist semirealism. (shrink)

In this entry I present one of the most hotly debated issues in contemporary analytic philosophy regarding the nature of fictional entities and the motivations that might be adduced for and against positing them into our ontology. The entry is divided in two parts. In the first part I offer an overview of the main accounts of the metaphysics of fictional entities according to three standard realist views, fictional Meinongianism, fictional possibilism and fictional creationism. In the second part I describe (...) two main kinds of arguments for or against positing fictional entities into our ontology. The first kind is traditionally inspired by the linguistic data coming from our talk about fictional characters. The second kind is more recent and it builds on genuine ontological considerations. (shrink)

Think of a number, any number, or properties like fragility and humanity. These and other abstract entities are radically different from concrete entities like electrons and elbows. While concrete entities are located in space and time, have causes and effects, and are known through empirical means, abstract entities like meanings and possibilities are remarkably different. They seem to be immutable and imperceptible and to exist "outside" of space and time. This book provides a comprehensive critical assessment of the problems raised (...) by abstract entities and the debates about existence, truth, and knowledge that surround them. It sets out the key issues that inform the metaphysical disagreement between platonists who accept abstract entities and nominalists who deny abstract entities exist. Beginning with the essentials of the platonist–nominalist debate, it explores the key arguments and issues informing the contemporary debate over abstract reality: arguments for platonism and their connections to semantics, science, and metaphysical explanation the abstract–concrete distinction and views about the nature of abstract reality epistemological puzzles surrounding our knowledge of mathematical entities and other abstract entities. arguments for nominalism premised upon concerns about paradox, parsimony, infinite regresses, underdetermination, and causal isolation nominalist options that seek to dispense with abstract entities. Including chapter summaries, annotated further reading, and a glossary, _Entities_ is essential reading for anyone seeking a clear and authoritative introduction to the problems raised by abstract entities. (shrink)

Entity alignment is the task of integrating heterogeneous knowledge among different knowledge graphs (KGs). KG is a popular way of storing facts about real-world entities. Unfortunately, a very limited number of the entities stored in different KGs are aligned. This paper presents an embedding-based entity alignment method that finds entity alignment by measuring the similarities between entity embeddings. Existing methods mainly focus on the relational structures and attributes information for the alignment process. Such methods fail while (...) the entities have a fewer number of attributes or when the relational structure could not capture the meaningful representation of the entities. To address this problem, we propose EASAE, an entity alignment method using summary and attribute embeddings. We exploit the entity summary information available in KGs for entities’ summary embedding. To learn the semantics of the entity summary, we employ bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). Our model learns the representations of entities by using relational triples, attribute triples and summary as well. We perform experiments on real-world datasets, and the results indicate that the proposed approach outperformed the state-of-the-art models for entity alignment. (shrink)

This article discusses the argument we cannot have knowledge of abstract entities because they are not part of the causal order. The claim of this article is that the argument fails because of equivocation. Assume that the “causal order” is concerned with contingent facts involving time and space. Even if the existence of abstract entities is not contingent and does not involve time or space it does not follow that no truths about abstract entities are contingent or involve time or (...) space. I argue that it is the latter which is required to obtain the desired conclusion. (shrink)

Ian Hacking’s entity realism was a strong intervention in late 20th-century debates about realism and truth. Hacking changed the stakes of the debate, moving from the question of how to find the proper theoretical description of an entity to the problem of finding a way to intervene on objects experimentally. This paper focuses on Hacking’s indexical theory of reference as a way to analyze the motivations for his view, as well as its limitations. Entity realism turns out (...) to rest on the possibility of indexical reference as a means of identifying unchanging entities independently of theoretical description. While this approach encounters difficulties, it also raises crucial questions not yet solved within the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Relying on the notion of “overlapping perspectives,” this paper argues that entity realism and perspectivism are complementary. According to entity realism, it is justified to maintain a positive attitude toward the existence of unobservable entities with which multiple experimental interactions are possible. Perspectivism also explains that our beliefs about these entities are bounded by historically contingent theoretical and instrumental perspectives. The argument of the paper is developed through a discussion of Ronald Giere’s versions of realism: entity realism, (...) constructive realism, and perspectival realism. (shrink)

Quantum mechanics was reformulated as an information theory involving a generalized kind of information, namely quantum information, in the end of the last century. Quantum mechanics is the most fundamental physical theory referring to all claiming to be physical. Any physical entity turns out to be quantum information in the final analysis. A quantum bit is the unit of quantum information, and it is a generalization of the unit of classical information, a bit, as well as the quantum information (...) itself is a generalization of classical information. Classical information refers to finite series or sets while quantum information, to infinite ones. Quantum information as well as classical information is a dimensionless quantity. Quantum information can be considered as a “bridge” between the mathematical and physical. The standard and common scientific epistemology grants the gap between the mathematical models and physical reality. The conception of truth as adequacy is what is able to transfer “over” that gap. One should explain how quantum information being a continuous transition between the physical and mathematical may refer to truth as adequacy and thus to the usual scientific epistemology and methodology. If it is the overall substance of anything claiming to be physical, one can question how different and dimensional physical quantities appear. Quantum information can be discussed as the counterpart of action. Quantum information is what is conserved, action is what is changed in virtue of the fundamental theorems of Emmy Noether (1918). The gap between mathematical models and physical reality, needing truth as adequacy to be overcome, is substituted by the openness of choice. That openness in turn can be interpreted as the openness of the present as a different concept of truth recollecting Heidegger’s one as “unconcealment” (ἀλήθεια). Quantum information as what is conserved can be thought as the conservation of that openness. (shrink)

Panpsychists aspire to explain human consciousness, but can they also account for the physical world? In this paper, I argue that proponents of a popular form of panpsychism cannot. I pose a new challenge against this form of panpsychism: it faces an explanatory gap between the fundamental experiences it posits and some physical entities. I call the problem of explaining the existence of these physical entities within the panpsychist framework “the missing entities problem.” Spacetime, the quantum state, and quantum gravitational (...) entities constitute three explanatory gaps as instances of the missing entities problem. Panpsychists are obliged to solve all instances of the missing entities problem; otherwise, panpsychism cannot be considered a viable theory of consciousness. (shrink)

Meta-ontology (in van Inwagen's sense) concerns the methodology of ontology, and a controversial meta-ontological issue is to what extent ontology can rely on linguistic analysis while establishing the furniture of the world. This paper discusses an argument advanced by some ontologists (I call them unifiers) against supporters of or coincident entities (I call them multipliers) and its meta-ontological import. Multipliers resort to Leibniz's Law to establish that spatiotemporally coincident entities a and b are distinct, by pointing at a predicate F (...) () made true by a and false by b. Unifiers try to put multipliers in front of a dilemma: in attempting to introduce metaphysical differences on the basis of semantic distinctions, multipliers either (a) rest on a fallacy of verbalism, entailed by a trade-off between a de dicto and a de re reading of modal claims, or (b) beg the question against unifiers by having to assume the distinction between a and b beforehand. I shall rise a tu quoque, showing that unifiers couldn't even distinguish material objects (or events) from the spatiotemporal regions they occupy unless they also resorted to linguistic distinctions. Their methodological aim to emancipate themselves from linguistic analysis in ontological businesses is therefore problematic. (shrink)

With the development of the Internet and artificial intelligence, cyberspace has become increasingly intertwined with human life. Consequently, the boundaries of human existence and identity are being reconsidered and redefined. This paper examines the entity types and philosophical implications of different forms of “humans” and “quasi-humans” (including humanoid machines and virtual humans) in the context of the cyber age, and discusses their relevance to philosophical inquiry into the nature of the “human.” First, the paper reviews existing notions of the (...) natural human, digital human, and robot. Drawing on cyberism—the study of the relationship between humans and cyberspace—it classifies different forms of human entities into five categories: the biological human, the cyborg human, the digital twin human, the virtual digital human, and the robot. Focusing on the “quasi-human” categories other than the biological human, the paper then investigates philosophical issues concerning ontology, identity, ethics, and rights, mortality and persistence, subjectivity and agency, and authenticity and simulation. This study aims to deepen understanding of human existence in the digital era and to explore the ethical and philosophical challenges posed by emerging types of human. (shrink)

The first question to be addressed about fictional entities is: are there any? The usual grounds given for accepting or rejecting the view that there are fictional entities come from linguistic considerations. We make many different sorts of claims about fictional characters in our literary discussions. How can we account for their apparent truth? Does doing so require that we allow that there are fictional characters we can refer to, or can we offer equally good analyses while denying that there (...) are any fictional entities? (shrink)

Linguistic entities play a major part in almost all elements of our lives. Despite this, relatively little work exists in philosophy that considers what such entities are. In the work that does focus specifically on the metaphysics of words, the dominant view is type-realism, which posits that words are abstract types, instantiated by concrete tokens. This book argues, however, that type-realism faces a range of problems and that positing abstract types cannot help us to explain a range of ordinary everyday (...) linguistic phenomena. In its place, this book argues in favour of a novel version of nominalism about words, holding that ordinary claims about words are in fact claims about collections of word-tokens only. Through combining nominalism with a trope-bundle metaphysics, this book proposes a 'bundle-nominalist' metaphysics of words, in which word-tokens are analysed as bundles of particular properties, which cluster in repeatable and predictable ways due to the acting of various homeostatic mechanisms. This view is then extended to other linguistic entities, such as morphemes, phonemes, sentences, and languages. The result is a unified metaphysics of linguistic entities, which is argued to be both consistent with linguistic theorising and highly explanatory. Words and Other Linguistic Entities outlines how this 'bundle-nominalist' metaphysics can provide new insights into a range of linguistic phenomena, including linguistic mistakes, linguistic change, and the nature of offensive language, and can help illuminate ongoing debates over the subject matter of linguistics and the evolution of language. (shrink)

Information entities are used in ontologies to represent engineering technical specifications, health records, pictures or librarian data about, e.g., narrative fictions, among others. The literature in applied ontology lacks a comparison of the state of the art, and foundational questions on the nature of information entities remain open for research. The purpose of the paper is twofold. First, to compare existing ontologies with both each other and theories proposed in philosophy, semiotics, librarianship, and literary studies in order to understand how (...) the ontologies conceive and model information entities. Second, to discuss some open research challenges that can lead to principled approaches for the treatment of information entities, possibly by getting into account the variety of information entity types found in the literature. (shrink)

Theodore Sider distinguishes two notions of global supervenience: strong global supervenience and weak global supervenience. He then discusses some applications to general metaphysical questions. Most interestingly, Sider employs the weak notion in order to undermine a familiar argument against coincident distinct entities. In what follows, I reexamine the two notions and distinguish them from a third, intermediate, notion (intermediate global supervenience). I argue that (a) weak global supervenience is not an adequate notion of dependence; (b) weak global supervenience does not (...) capture certain assumptions about coincidence relations; (c) these assumptions are better accommodated by the stronger notion of intermediate global supervenience; (d) intermediate global supervenience, however, is also not an adequate notion of dependence; and (e) strong global supervenience is an adequate notion of dependence. It also fits in with anti-individualism about the mental. It does not, however, serve to rebut arguments against coincident entities. (shrink)

It has been suggested that puzzles in the interpretation of quantum mechanics motivate consideration of entities that are numerically distinct but do not stand in a relation of identity with themselves or non-identity with others. Quite apart from metaphysical concerns, I argue that talk about such entities is either meaningless or not about such entities. It is meaningless insofar as we attempt to take the foregoing characterization literally. It is meaningful, however, if talk about entities without identity is taken as (...) elliptical for either nominal or predicative use of a special class of mass terms. (shrink)

I propose a fourfold categorisation of entities according to whether or not they possess determinate identity-conditions and whether or not they are determinately countable. Some entities – which I call ‘individual objects’ – have both determinate identity and determinate countability: for example, persons and animals. In the case of entities of a kind K belonging to this category, we are in principle always entitled to expect there to be determinate answers to such questions as ‘Is x the same K as (...) y?’ and ’How many Ks are there satisfying condition C?’, even if we may sometimes be unable in practice to discover what these answers are. But other entities apparently lack either determinate identity, or determinate countability, or both. In these terms I try to explain certain important ontological differences between familiar macroscopic objects and various rather more esoteric entities, such as the ‘particles’ of quantum physics, quantities of material stuff, and tropes or property instances. (shrink)

Within the context of Twitter analytics, the notion of implicit entity linking has recently been introduced to refer to the identification of a named entity, which is central to the topic of the tw...

Scientific realists are committed to the claim that scientific discourse should be interpreted realistically, so that theoretical terms are understood as putatively referring expressions that have putative reference to empirical entities. In order to argue against realistic interpretation, I draw on an episode from the history of chemistry. One of the hypothetical entities of late 18th century chemistry was the muriatic radical, a hitherto unknown element that was thought to be a constituent of muriatic acid. I argue that the term (...) 'muriatic radical' resists realistic interpretation, and that we should therefore refrain from interpreting discourse concerning hypothetical entities realistically. (shrink)

Oystein Linnebo's book Thin Objects is partly devoted to defending the view that some objects are “thin” in that their existence does not impose any substantive demands on the world. In this paper, I discuss the concern that the defense relies on there being entities that serve as the referents of predicates. Linnebo thus seems to assume the thinness of those entities. In the course of my discussion, I also discuss what Linnebo says about the role of criteria of identity (...) in his discussion of reference and existence. (shrink)

Implicit attitudes are the unconscious and automatic evaluations people make about objects, persons, and groups. These attitudes have been the subject of much discussion in the social and cognitive psychology literature of the past three decades. This paper explores whether it is justified to hold that implicit attitudes, seen as theoretical entities posited by empirical psychology, are real. We approach this question by drawing on the realism-antirealism debate in philosophy of science. To this end, we compare implicit attitudes with commonsense (...) belief/desire psychology, which, among other things, deploys explicit attitudes to explain behavior. We argue that the traditional arguments for and against realism about commonsense psychology do not apply to the case of implicit attitudes. However, we mount an alternative argument for realism about implicit attitudes, based on the criteria offered by entity realism, namely modifiability, non-redundancy, and robustness. We show that this framework is nicely applicable to implicit attitudes. However, it does not yet justify our belief in these attitudes. In order to take implicit attitudes as real within this entity realist approach, the reproducibility of each implicit measure as well as the correlation between different measures must be increased. (shrink)

Ordinary reasoning about space—we argue—is first and foremost reasoning about things or events located in space. Accordingly, any theory concerned with the construction of a general model of our spatial competence must be grounded on a general account of the sort of entities that may enter into the scope of the theory. Moreover, on the methodological side the emphasis on spatial entities (as opposed to purely geometrical items such as points or regions) calls for a reexamination of the conceptual categories (...) required for this task. Building on material presented in an earlier paper, in this work we offer some examples of what this amounts to, of the difficulties involved, and of the main directions along which spatial theories should be developed so as to combine formal sophistication with some affinity with common sense. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that some objections raised by Jantzen (Synthese, 2010 ) against the separation of the concepts of ‘counting’ and ‘identity’ are misled. We present a definition of counting in the context of quasi-set theory requiring neither the labeling nor the identity and individuality of the counted entities. We argue that, contrary to what Jantzen poses, there are no problems with the technical development of this kind of definition. As a result of being able (...) to keep counting and identity apart for those entities, we briefly suggest that one venerable tradition concerning the nature of quantum particles may be consistently held. According to that tradition, known as the Received View on particles non-individuality, quantum particles may be seen as entities having both features: (i) identity and individuality do not apply to them, (ii) they may be gathered in collections comprising a plurality of them. (shrink)

Hacking and other entity realists suggest a strategy to build scientific realism on a stronger foundation than inference to the best explanation. They argue that if beliefs in the existence of theoretical entities are derived from experimentation rather than theories, they can escape the antirealist's criticism and provide a stronger ground for realism. In this paper, an outline and a critique of entity realism are presented. It will be argued that entity realism cannot stand as a separate (...) position from classical realism. Thus, entity realism cannot avoid the problems facing classical realism.. (shrink)

This chapter deals with the most “elementary” entities of the static ontology I propose. The choice to begin with this static aspect is explained by the desire to address from the outset the question of the specificity of the social sciences, which study activities involving human beings, i.e. particular beings. I will examine the status that can be given, from the point of view of these sciences, to members of the human species, to animals, to objects, but also to cognitive (...) and discursive entities. This chapter presents categories and their definitions, but also leaves open questions such as the status of animals and, more generally, of living beings. It includes a dynamic dimension in that I propose to dissociate entities from their status in interaction, i.e. in a process. The statuses are those of resource, constraint, stake or interaction partner, with a distinction for resources between the instrumental aspect (interacting with entities considered as resources) and the coordination aspect (interacting with entities considered as interaction partners). (shrink)

When seeing a jaguar, we can see all the spots on its mantle without seeing a determinate number, N, of spots on the mantle. How is this visual phenomenon possible? Philosophers have tried to provide a reliable answer to this question, by recruiting evidence from vision science about the way attention works. Here we push this idea forward, by suggesting that an alternative and less complex solution, with respect to the one proposed in the literature, is possible. In particular, we (...) argue that the puzzling visual phenomenon of 'seeing entities without seeing N-entities' strictly depends on the specific number of entities we are simultaneously attending to: a problematic scenario concerning this visual process arises only when the number of entities in the visual field exceeds a specific quantity. This depends, as we argue, on the fact that the nature of our visual content is modulated, in this perceptual scenario, by the limited way we can exercise visual attention on the properties of the objects of our perception. Differently from other accounts, our proposal allows us to properly define when and why such a problem arises, and explains why such a situation has traditionally been found to be so puzzling. Our idea is also well motivated by experimental results that so far have not been taken into account in the debate. (shrink)

Entity linking involves mapping ambiguous mentions in documents to the correct entities in a given knowledge base. Most existing methods failed to link when a mention appears multiple times in a document, since the conflict of its contexts in different locations may lead to difficult linking. Sentence representation, which has been studied based on deep learning approaches recently, can be used to resolve the above issue. In this paper, an effective entity linking model is proposed to capture the (...) semantic meaning of the sentences and reduce the noise introduced by different contexts of the same mention in a document. This model first uses the symmetry of the Siamese network to learn the sentence similarity. Then, the attention mechanism is added to improve the interaction between input sentences. To show the effectiveness of our sentence representation model combined with attention mechanism, named ELSR, extensive experiments are conducted on two public datasets. Results illustrate that our model outperforms the baselines and achieves the superior performance. (shrink)

Genera, typically hand-in-hand with their branching species, are essential elements of vocabulary-based information constructs, in particular scientific taxonomies. Should they also feature in formal ontologies, the highest of such constructs? I argue in this article that the answer is “Yes” and that the question posed in its title also has a Yes-answer: The way medieval ontologists sliced up the world into genera does matter to formal ontology. More specifically, the way Dietrich of Freiberg, a Latin scholastic, conceived and applied strictly (...) generic criteria to slice up the world into its entities can provide some guidelines to the field of formal ontology with respect to not only its contents, but also its scope. In particular, Dietrich's information criterion plays here a central role. (shrink)

How can a metaphysics of abstract entities be built upon a metaphysics of time? In this paper, I address the question of how to accommodate abstract entities in a presentist world. I consider both the traditional metaontological approach of unrestricted fundamental quantification and then ontological pluralism. I argue that under the former we need to impose two constraints in the characterization of presentism in order to avoid undesired commitments to abstract entities: we have to characterize presentism as a thesis only (...) about the concrete, and we also need to avoid the widely held distinction between tensed and tenseless senses of existence. Under ontological pluralism, instead, I argue that we can naturally accommodate any view of abstract objects in a presentist world. (shrink)

' I heartily recommend it to any philosopher of language interested in the issues. [] Logicians, of course, will want to savour the whole thing.' Australian Journal of Philosophy, 71:3 (1993).

This article approaches style as an ontological aporia: the condition of appearing that can not be grasped either as a property of an entity or as Being itself. Beginning from the etymological constellation of stilus/stylus and στῦλος, it reconstructs a tension between writing and architectural space, and shows how visible mappings of space (peristyle, hypostyle) articulate a schema in which things appear or withdraw. The argument then turns to Aristotle’s dynamis and energeia in order to describe style as a (...) “between” that precedes determinate traits as their condition of possibility. Finally, through Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche’s “grand style” and Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on expression, the paper clarifies how style both enables and destabilizes the ontic-ontological binary. Style is thus neither ornament nor a “third” thing, but the work of mediation through which appearing is possible. (shrink)

In this chapter I investigate the prospects of integrated history and philosophy of science, by examining how philosophical issues raised by “hidden entities”, entities that are not accessible to unmediated observation, can enrich the historical investigation of their careers. Conversely, I suggest that the history of those entities has important lessons to teach to the philosophy of science. Hidden entities have played a crucial role in the development of the natural sciences. Despite their centrality to past scientific practice, however, several (...) of them (e.g., phlogiston, caloric, and the ether) turned out to be fictitious. For this reason, they have figured prominently in recent debates on scientific realism. The issues I explore in this paper are entangled with those debates. I argue that our understanding of hidden entities and their role in experimental practice can be enhanced by adopting an integrated historical-cum-philosophical approach. On the one hand, philosophical reflection on the reality of those entities has a lot to gain by examining historically how they were ntroduced and investigated. On the other hand, the historical reconstruction of the careers of those entities may profit from philosophical reflection on their existence. (shrink)

Much work in social ontology analyzes how social entities are based on collective intentionality. A neglected perspective is, however, the distinction between those social entities that are explicitly established (often called formal institutions, like marriages), those that are established but not explicitly (informal institutions, like friendships), and those that are not established at all (social macro entities, like episodes of inflation). To shed more light on this trichotomy, a collection of examples taken from the works of John Searle will be (...) discussed, comprising money, marriages, friendship, cocktail parties, natural language, and episodes of inflation. The chapter argues that explicit establishment confers certain typical characteristics on formal institutions that informal institutions lack, thus explaining the typical differences between marriages and friendship. The focus on explicit establishment further develops Khalidi’s classification of social kinds, and it contributes to Epstein’s quest for grounds and anchors of social entities. It can thus contribute to overcoming the narrow focus on collective intentionality. (shrink)

The second highest level of the divided line in Plato’s Republic (510b-511a) appears to be about the entities of mathematics—entities such as particular (though non-physical) triangles. It differs from the highest level in two respects. It involves reasoning from hypotheses, and it uses visible images. This article defends the traditional view that the passage is indeed about these mathematical ‘intermediates’; and tries to show how the apparently different features of the second level are related, by focussing on Plato’s need to (...) give an account of how we can speak of many particulars of the same kind, without assuming that they are imperfect copies, in the way sensible things can be imperfect copies, of forms. (shrink)

An entity x is said to be generically dependent on a type F if x cannot exist without at least one entity of type F existing. In this paper several varieties of generic dependence are distinguished, differing in the nature of the relationship between an entity and the instances of a type on which it generically depends, and in the light of this, criteria of identity for generically dependent entities are investigated. These considerations are then illustrated in (...) detail in a series of three case studies, covering shapes, linguistic entities such as letters, words and sentences, and collectives. Each case study examines how far the entities involved have robust identity criteria, and to the extent that they do not it is questioned whether they can be regarded as bona fide examples of generic dependent entities. Finally, in the light of this, a number of possible accounts that may be given of the ontological status of such entities are considered. (shrink)

Can phenomenologists allow for the existence of unobservable entities such as atoms, electrons, and quarks? Can we justifiably believe in the existence of entities that are in principle unobservable? This paper addresses the relationship between Husserlian transcendental phenomenology and scientific realism. More precisely, the focus is on the question of whether there are basic epistemological principles phenomenologists are committed to that have anti-realist consequences with respect to unobservable entities. This question is relevant since Husserl’s basic epistemological principles, such as the (...) “principle of all principles,” seem to suggest that epistemic justification is limited to what can be originally given in the sense that if an object cannot be given in an originary presentive intuition, then one cannot be justified in believing that this object exists. It is the main aim of this paper to show (i) that interpretative reasons exist for not reading Husserl in such a way and (ii) that systematic reasons exist as to why phenomenologists should not subscribe to this criterion. I shall put forward a different criterion of justification that satisfies the spirit of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology and allows for justifiably believing in the existence of unobservable scientific entities. (shrink)

Peter Geach's puzzle of intentional identity is to explain how the claim ‘Hob thinks a witch has blighted Bob's mare, and Nob wonders whether she killed Cob's sow’ is compatible with there being no such witch. I clarify the puzzle and reduce it to the familiar problem of negative existentials. That problem is a paradox of representations that seem to include denials of commitment , to carry commitment to what they deny commitment to, and to be true. The best proposed (...) solutions can be understood through this paradox; I evaluate them, and defend a new solution. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the collaboration between healthcare professionals and algorithms in making decisions within the realm of public healthcare. By extending the concept of ‘tinkering’ from previous research conducted by philosopher Mol (Care in practice. On tinkering in clinics, homes and farms Verlag, Amsterdam, 2010) and anthropologist Pols (Health Care Anal 18: 374–388, 2009), who highlighted the improvisational and adaptive practices of healthcare professionals, this paper reveals that in the context of digitalizing healthcare, both professionals and algorithms engage in what (...) I call ‘collaborative tinkering’ as they navigate the intricate and unpredictable nature of healthcare situations together. The paper draws upon an idea that is increasingly common in academic literature, namely that healthcare professionals and the algorithms they use can form a hybrid decision-making entity, challenging the conventional notion of agency and intelligence as being exclusively confined to individual humans or machines. Drawing upon an international, ethnographic study conducted in different hospitals around the world, the paper describes empirically how humans and algorithms come to decisions together, making explicit how, in the practice of daily work, agency and intelligence are distributed among a range of actors, including humans, technologies, knowledge resources, and the spaces where they interact. The concept of collaborative tinkering helps to make explicit how both healthcare professionals and algorithms engage in adaptive improvisation. This exploration not only enriches the understanding of collaborative dynamics between humans and AI but also problematizes the individualistic conception of AI that still exists in regulatory frameworks. By introducing empirical specificity through ethnographic insights and employing an anthropological perspective, the paper calls for a critical reassessment of current ethical and policy frameworks governing human–AI collaboration in healthcare, thereby illuminating direct implications for the future of AI ethics in medical practice. (shrink)

I propose a novel explanation on the nature of fictional entities that fulfills two requirements: it links the production of fictional entities with fiction-making declarations, and it characterizes fictional entities so as to explain the normative attributes that allow fictional entities to interact with our social world. I adopt a realist perspective in which fictional entities are social entities. The explanation combines Abell declarative theory of fictional utterances with Searle’s institutional theory, given that neither theory by itself can satisfy both (...) requirements. The result is an original proposal about the nature of fictional entities, which presents them as social objects produced by declarative speech acts that function as status functionFunctionstatus declarations. They carry deontic powers and depend on collective recognition to exist. (shrink)

But how can any entity be not self-identical? If it is both itself and another, then it is not an entity but a pair of entities. At best, an entity which is not self-identical is a series of concrete, self-identical, unchanging entities, parallel to what Whitehead calls "personal order." But even then the series itself would be self-identical qua a series, although its constituents exhibit successive differences. Therefore, to speak of entities which are not self-identical is either (...) not precise or contradictory. It is not precise if two or more entities are referred to as one entity, even if this one entity is then said to be not self-identical. It is contradictory if a self-identical series or collection of self-identical entities is called a non-self-identical entity. Therefore, for the same reason for which a concrete entity cannot change, no entity can change. (shrink)

We discuss two named-entity recognition models which use characters and character n-grams either exclusively or as an important part of their data representation. The first model is a character-level HMM with minimal context information, and the second model is a maximum-entropy conditional markov model with substantially richer context features. Our best model achieves an overall F1 of 86.07% on the English test data (92.31% on the development data). This number represents a 25% error reduction over the same model without (...) word-internal (substring) features. (shrink)

Biomedical ontologies define entities and relations in order to represent knowledge in the biomedical domain. In addition, many ontologies further represent supplementary knowledge by linking terms from an external controlled vocabulary to the entities defined within the ontology itself. In this paper we concentrate on the domain of medical imaging, for which controlled vocabularies are emerging, but no ontology currently exists. We analyzed computed tomography reports in order to determine to which entities terms used in such reports refer and which (...) relations are used with regard to the recently published Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Relation Ontology. Our analysis revealed that the majority of entities referred to in radiological reporting practice are anatomical entities and anatomical coordinates. Based on the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Relation Ontology we provide a set of additional relations for the ontological structuring of image features such as shape, morphology, size and signal, frequently found in the reports. On the basis of these results we conclude that the construction of an imaging ontology may benefit greatly from already existing reference ontologies such as the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA), which represent those entities to which radiological reports most frequently refer. (shrink)

Quantum field theory (QFT) remains the most successful theoretical framework in modern physics, yet its foundational ontology is contested. This article identifies a source of persistent ambiguity: the conflation of distinct functional roles under the concept of a “field.” To clarify this, it introduces a structural typology distinguishing three types of fields—interaction, projection, and actualization fields—each corresponding to a distinct role in the layered architecture of physical theories. -/- The framework is applied to interpret foundational phenomena such as the quantum (...) vacuum, the emergence of spacetime geometry, and the status of gauge symmetry. Rather than proposing a metaphysical unification, the typology offers a conceptual scaffold for disaggregating theoretical functions in QFT. The result is a clearer understanding of field ontology that avoids premature collapse of functional distinctions. (shrink)

This paper argues that existence claims for theoretical entities must be based on more than their role in one theory. The supplementary evidence should be either observation, whether direct or indirect, or the possibility of detaching the existence claim from one particular theory. A logical schematism for the latter type of support is developed.

I argue that even though fictional entities are prototypically narrative entities, they still are concrete cultural artifacts. Fictional characters are not objects, but narrative functions within a story that are always immanent in a material representation. I explain how fictional entities are concrete cultural artefacts, appealing to the fact that human culture is primarily a material culture. Fictional entities are materially available in the ecological niche that a community inhabits; they are shared, manipulated, and reproduced as material objects. These material (...) representations may be internalized by individuals in the form of modal concepts: they fundamentally are material props for human cognitive skills, which include narrative practices. This is the framework within which narratives develop as a collective emergence of a human community. Fictional entities are publicly crafted cultural artefacts in that they fundamentally lean on public representations that eventually can achieve a canonical status. I end by developing further on a specific kind of fictional entities, scientific models, specifying the cognitive role played by these fictional entities into our communities in so far as they are public representations. (shrink)

Quine has persuasively shown that the empiricist "dogma of reductionism", which is the belief that each meaningfiil statement of science can be reduced to statements about immediate sense experience, must be abandoned. However, Quine's methodology of ontology seems to incorporate an analogous physicalistic dogma according to which the identity conditions of each scientifically respectable sort of abstract objects can be reduced to the identity conditions of physical objects. This paper aims to show that the latter dogma must be abandoned, too. (...) In section 1, the reductionist methodology underlying Quine's prescript "No Entity without Identity" is reconstructed in detail. In section 2 and 3, this methodology is criticized on the ground that Quine's individuation of sets offendsagainst the reductive Criteria of adequacy for individuations that are presupposed by his criticism of the ontological recognition of intensional objects. Finally, in section 4 an alternative holistic conception of individuation is outlined. (shrink)

The paper discusses the version of entity realism presented by Ian Hacking in his book, Representing and Intervening. Hacking holds that an ontological form of scientific realism, entity realism, may be defended on the basis of experimental practices which involve the manipulation of unobservable entities. There is much to be said in favour of the entity realist position that Hacking defends, especially the pragmatist orientation of his approach to realism. But there are problems with the position. The (...) paper explores two issues that reflect negatively on Hacking’s version of the entity realist position. The first issue relates to the role of description in fixing the reference of theoretical terms. The second issue relates to Hacking’s claim that the argument for entity realism based on experiment is a different kind of argument from the standard argument for scientific realism based on the success of science. (shrink)