Prof Barry Smith (philosophy, Buffalo) will be talking on “The Ontology of Health and Disease” in King’s College, London at 1.30pm on April 29.
Abstract:
“The Ontology of Disease”
A recent paper in the journal
Healthcare Informatics Researchidentifies a paradigm shift - ‘from concept representations to ontologies’ - in the ways medical terminologies and vocabularies are used to describe medical data [1]. We will describe what this paradigm shift involves, what it means to talk about ‘ontologies’ in the medical context, and how such talk relates to
the
traditional concerns of philosophical ontologists. We shall conclude with an ontological definition of disease, and illustrations of how this definition can be applied to a range of clinical examples.
[1] See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3920035/