Biomedical software ontologies provide a means for the representation of facts gathered through biomedical research and clinical observation. At the foundation of good software ontology design lays a sound philosophical realism that supplies the basic framework required to support the computable management of this information correctly and consistently. In numerous biomedical subdomains (such as anatomy, disease classification, or functional genomics), a good degree of success has been achieved through the realist approach. In the field of psychiatry, however, the analytic tools of ontological realism are challenged to account for subjective mental experiences that typically lay beyond their scope. Although psychiatric symptoms , such as delusions, hallucinations, or memory loss, may be too ethereal to account for in terms of a realist ontology, by focusing on some psychiatric signs , such as images of the human brain (which are in themselves subject to ontological analysis), we may be able to make some in-roads toward an application ontology of the psychiatric domain. In this paper, via the ontological framework of Polish phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, we discuss the differences between the ontology of the body and the ontology of the image, and apply the subsequent image-ontology framework to the domain of neuroimaging. We aim to demonstrate how such an ontology may lead to the perspicuous structuring of clinical information in psychiatry and the benefits application ontologies afford may subsequently be attained within a portion of this particularly difficult domain.
Comparisons of Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Cage typically focus on the “later Wittgenstein” of the Philosophical Investigations. However, in this article I focus on the deep intellectual sympathy between the “early Wittgenstein” of the Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus—with its evocative and controversial invocation of silence at the end, the famous proposition 7: “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent”—and Cage's equally evocative and controversial work on the same theme—his “silent piece,” 4′33″. This sympathy expresses itself not only in the common aim of the two works (a mystical appreciation for the ordinary, everyday world that surrounds us) but also in a shared methodology for bringing about this aim (tracing the limits of language from within in order to transcend those very limits). In this sense, I argue that Cage's work gives a concrete, performative reality to Wittgenstein's early conception of language as well as the mystical revelation that lies behind it.
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