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The main purpose of this paper is to provide a critical overview of the key contributions made by Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre in Qu'est-ce que l'actualité politique? Événements et opinions aux XXIe siècle. Whereas Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities is essentially a study in economic sociology, Boltanski and Esquerre's latest book reflects a shift in emphasis towards political sociology. As demonstrated in this paper, their inquiry into the ontologie de l'actualité – that is, the ontology of contemporary reality – contains valuable insights into the relationship between the production, circulation, and consumption of news, on the one hand, and the emergence of processes of politicization, on the other. The first half of this paper comprises a summary of the central arguments developed in Boltanski and Esquerre's investigation, before moving, in the second half, to an assessment of its most significant limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within IR, scholars are starting to consider difference on the level of ontology rather than epistemology. Other worlds are introduced into IR's political pluriverse, however, these are often encountered in faraway places, thereby playing into the colonial narrative that ontological difference does not exist in the 'West'. This paper introduces another real from within the 'disenchanted North' that is shaped by contemplative activists: people using contemplation as a form of protest. An engagement with contemplative activism challenges our commonly held assumptions about what contemplation and social change are, thereby undermining the institutions of 'science' and 'religion' underlying the universe. It argues that the project of political ontology in IR should consist of two moves: drawing in other, in particular spiritual, realities into the political imaginations of IR and challenging the ontological assumptions underpinning concepts. Consequently, it suggests that the pluriverse in IR should be a methodological rather than an ontological commitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This issue of Transcultural Psychiatry presents selected papers from the McGill Advanced Study Institute on "Cultural Poetics of Illness and Healing." The meeting addressed the cognitive science of language, metaphor, and poiesis from embodied and enactivist perspectives; how cultural affordances, background knowledge, discourse, and practices enable and constrain poiesis; the cognitive and social poetics of symptom and illness experience; and the politics and practice of poetics in healing ritual, psychotherapy, and recovery. This introductory essay outlines an approach to illness experience and its transformation in healing practices that emphasizes embodied processes of metaphor as well as the social processes of self-construal and positioning through material and discursive engagements with the cultural affordances that constitute our local worlds. The approach has implications for theory building, training, and clinical practice in psychiatry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges François Jullien's reading of Chinese thought based on his disjunction between ontology and shi, or propensity. According to Jullien, the Chinese history of ideas has been a never-changing entity in a homogeneous society for thousands of years. Jullien's juxtaposing and contrasting 'European thought' and 'Chinese thought' falls into the trap of cultural essentialism he wanted to avoid. Jullien's interpretation of shi also led him to believe that Chinese people never challenge reality, never confront or resist, tend to stay in conformity, and lack interest in critical thinking. This paper argues that, despite the combination of Confucianism, Daoism and Legalism that constituted a powerful paradigm of normative governmentality of the hierarchical system in different dynasties in Chinese history, the spirit of political resistance has never ceased. Zhang Taiyan, at the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of Republican China, demonstrated the tradition of such critical political thinkers. The re-reading of Zhang Taiyan's Buddhist-inspired reading of Zhuangzi could offer us an additional possibility for the emancipatory and political thinking that can be inspirational even today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on the archives of Michel Foucault collected (since 2013) at the Manuscripts Department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Our investigation focuses in particular on a complete manuscript, until now totally unknown and entitled ' Phénoménologie et psychologie ' ('Phenomenology and Psychology'). This manuscript could be the first project for a thesis devoted to 'The Notion of the "World" in Phenomenology', written around 1953–4, at the same time as a manuscript on Binswanger and existential psychiatry and as a manuscript on philosophical anthropology. We aim to show the importance that phenomenology seems to have held for Foucault at the beginning of the 1950s and in particular the role that it could have played in Foucault's distancing himself from a naturalist psychology and a philosophy of consciousness to which he opposes a philosophy of the world, of being and of language. Foucault thus discovers a truth of the phenomenology which rests on the radicality of the transcendental gesture and on the access to an ontology gathering the being, the meaning and the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a historical ethnography of how Brazil's post-dictatorial psychiatric reforms have shaped young people's lives, this paper builds on Eve Sedgwick's analysis of the hermeneutics of suspicion to show that narrow applications of Foucault's biopower concept nurture forms of resistance to bio-reductionism centred primarily on epistemic deconstruction. To unsettle this hermeneutic, I put young people's theories of power into conversation with Georges Canguilhem's concept of the milieu and with feminist scholars' work on prefigurative politics. I introduce the concepts of threading and unthreading to consider how one subject of biopower, the child-like biobehavioural figure, was continuously being threaded within a specific milieu and in relation to another key figure: the elite angst-ridden 'storm-and-stress' adolescent. Young people's subsequent unthreading and reweaving politics, flourishing in co-construction with what I call the politicizing clinic, illustrate how decolonial pedagogies can incrementally change the patterning of social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a framework that detects potential ontology building errors to improve the ontology quality. These potential errors are called ontology pitfalls in the literature. This work extends the existing ontology pitfall set in the literature and suggests new solutions for ontology repair. We have also developed a Java implementation for detection of the proposed pitfalls. These pitfalls were evaluated with well-known ontologies using this implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of digital disconnection – the voluntary non-use of digital media – is a growing research domain characterized by increasingly pluralistic approaches. To map this diverse terrain, we offer an analytical heuristic: a continuum of approaches to digital disconnection. This tool proposes one primary dimension – viewing digital disconnection as individually functional to socially meaningful (ontology) – and two secondary, concomitant dimensions – holding post-positive to interpretivist perspectives on knowledge generation (epistemology) as well as applying quantitative to qualitative methods (methodology). We offer examples of scholarship along the continuum and advocate for the complementarity of different approaches. Although the continuum is not a universal framework, it provides a tool for scholars to review the domain and for digital disconnection researchers specifically to locate themselves on and build bridges across the continuum. We hope that this continuum supports and expands the pluralistic nature of digital disconnection scholarship into the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural heritage is the legacy of physical artefacts and intangible attributes of a group or society that is inherited from past generations. Terminology is a tool for the dissemination and communication of cultural heritage. The lack of clearly identified terminologies is an obstacle to communication and knowledge sharing. Especially, for experts with different languages, it is difficult to understand what the term refers to only through terms. Our work aims to respond to this issue by implementing practices drawn from the Semantic Web and ISO Terminology standards (ISO 704 and ISO 1087-1) and more particularly, by building in a W3C format ontology as knowledge infrastructure to construct a multilingual terminology e-Dictionary. The Chinese ceramic vases of the Ming and Qing dynasties are the application cases of our work. The method of building ontology is the 'term-and-characteristic guided method', which follows the ISO principles of Terminology. The main result of this work is an online terminology e-Dictionary. The terminology e-Dictionary could help archaeologists communicate and understand the concepts denoted by terms in different languages and provide a new perspective based on ontology for the digital protection of cultural heritage. The e-Dictionary was published at http://www.dh.ketrc.com/e-dictionary.html. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Channeling affinities with certain motifs of Daoism, Walter Benjamin renews a form of dialectical thought that diffuses ideological notions of progress and grants minimal weight to the ontological distinction of the Subject. In fleeting yet pivotal moments of contact with Chinese aesthetics, Benjamin moves attention toward the practice of 'thinking by way of resemblance' – a phenomenon he variously enacts. Calling forth resonances within late-capitalist modernity, he retrieves from Daoist literature a notion of dialectical reversal freed from progressive synthesis, as well as image-repertoires of self-forgetting, which he understands to be irreducible to reification. The Daoist imaginary offers Benjamin resources for breaking open the anthropocentric closure of Hellenic accounts of mimesis. He theorizes similitude more capaciously as something that can flash up across temporally discontinuous phenomena – without deferring to predetermined categories of Being. Benjamin thus recasts resemblance – regarded by Enlightenment rationality as an impoverished mode of cognition – as a medium of historical apprehension that resists the occlusion of transience by the ontology of the victors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a cognitive anthropological critique of François Jullien's approach to language and culture. Jullien approaches 'culture' as a coherent set of concepts across time and space, relying primarily on identifying Chinese (and Greek) thought with particular concepts expressed in language. This mischaracterizes human culture, which exists on the level of individual mental representations, and relies on a form of linguistic determinism which fails to stand in the face of psychological and anthropological evidence. This leads Jullien to claim an incredible degree of cultural (and ontological) divergence between the Chinese and Europeans. By accounting for the distribution and dynamism of mental representations, the degree to which thought is underdetermined by language, and above all the divergence of intuitive and reflective cognition on the individual level, we can arrive at an alternative, ontologically realistic account of cultural divergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores whether ontology is internal to traditional Chinese culture from the perspective of the view from above. Ancient Chinese philosophy, poetry, and art abound with all kinds of descriptions of viewing from above. Such views from on high, as illustrated by famous works discussed in this essay, usually admit of no fixed focus; that is, there is no ontic being, concealed or disclosed, controlling the perceiving eyes. The gaze from above, which is either fluid or decentered, in some cases does not even focus on any real object. It merely reveals an abstract historical review or an attitudinal stance. As such, the fushi gaze, devoid of any concrete object of perception or any central point of reference, always points to the absence of ontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dietary practices are governed by a mix of ethnographic aspects, such as social, cultural and environmental factors. These aspects need to be taken into consideration during an analysis of food-related queries. Queries are usually ambiguous. It is essential to understand, analyse and refine the queries for better search and retrieval. The work is focused on identifying the explicit, implicit and hidden facets of a query, taking into consideration the context – culinary domain. This article proposes a technique for query understanding, analysis and refinement based on a domain specific knowledge model. Queries are conceptualised by mapping the query term to concepts defined in the model. This allows an understanding of the semantic point of view of a query and an ability to determine the meaning of its terms and their interrelatedness. The knowledge model acts as a backbone providing the context for query understanding, analysis and refinement and outperforms other models, such as Schema.org, BBC Food Ontology and Recipe Ontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Jennifer Billman, western evaluation bias against indigenous thinking is due to ontological incompetence. If so, the solution she offers (a highly abstract list of criteria) is inadequate since it fails to address let alone resolve a wide range of philosophical dilemmas at the intersection of logic and ontology. Furthermore, it fails to "frame evaluation in reality" since it ignores the patent fact that, in the market society, positivist evaluators dominate. They are value free, embrace a "clockwork" conception of the natural and social world, and do not question decision makers' goals. By contrast, constructivist evaluators recognize that social facts differ from natural facts since they are socially constructed and clustered within institutions that define roles, norms and expectations. It follows that constructivist evaluation holds the key to the problem identified by Billman since it resists capture by vested interests, gives pride of place to the relational context and embraces the validity of indigenous thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For over 30 years, calls have been issued for the western evaluation field to address implicit bias in its theory and practice. Although many in the field encourage evaluators to be culturally competent, ontological competence remains unaddressed. Grounded in an institutionalized distrust of non-western perspectives of reality and knowledge frameworks, this neglect threatens the validity, reliability, and usefulness of western designed evaluations conducted in non-western settings. To address this, I introduce Ontologically Integrative Evaluation (OIE), a new framework built upon ontological competence and six foundational ontological concepts: ontological fluidity, authenticity, validity, synthesis, justice, and vocation. Grounding evaluation in three ontological considerations—what there is, what is real, and what is fundamental—OIE systematically guides evaluators through a deep exploration of their own and others' ontological assumptions. By demonstrating the futility of evaluations grounded in a limited ontological worldview, OIE bridges the current divide between western and non-western evaluative thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phrase 'To perish from absolute knowledge' from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil runs like a red thread throughout Foucault's reading of Nietzsche, spanning a period of 20 years in which Foucault continuously turned to Nietzsche as his main philosophical and methodological role model. Beginning with his first lectures on Nietzsche in the early 1950s, Foucault repeatedly alluded to this phrase as the key to Nietzsche's philosophical critique which anticipated the philosophical shift to ontology in the 20th century. Drawing on a host of unpublished essays from Foucault's archive, it will be shown that this phrase holds the key to Foucault's Nietzsche interpretation and explains his reliance on historicity as the transcendental basis for his critical project. The article will rely on Foucault's dynamic analysis of this phrase to narrate the development of his historical methodology between the 1950s and the mid-1970s, and will argue for the continuity and coherence of Foucault's critical project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the next step in the development of intelligent computing systems is the addition of human expertise and knowledge, it is a priority to build strong computable and well-documented knowledge bases. Ontologies partially respond to this challenge by providing formalisms for knowledge representation. However, one major remaining task is the population of these ontologies with concrete application. Based on Model-Driven Engineering principles, a generic metamodel for the extraction of heterogeneous data is presented in this article. The metamodel has been designed with two objectives, namely (1) the need of genericity regarding the source of collected pieces of knowledge and (2) the intent to stick to a structure close to an ontological structure. As well, an example of instantiation of the metamodel for textual data in chemistry domain and an insight of how this metamodel could be integrated in a larger automated domain independent ontology population framework are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present era of information, the problem of effective knowledge retrieval from a collection of scientific documents becomes especially important for continuous scientific progress. The information available in scientific publications traditionally consists of bibliometric metadata and its semantic component such as title, abstract and text. While the former having a machine-readable format usually used for knowledge mapping and pattern recognition, the latter designed for human interpretation and analysis. Only a few studies use full-text analysis, based on carefully selected scientific ontology, to map the actual structure of the scientific knowledge or uncover similarities between documents. Unfortunately, the presence of common (basic) concepts across semantically unrelated documents creates spurious connections between different topics. We revise the known method based on the entropic information-theoretic measure used for selecting basic concepts and propose to analyse the dynamics of Shannon entropy for more rigorous sorting of concepts by their generality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organisations use data in different formats: Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, databases, HTML pages and so on. It is not easy to make decisions with such data due to the lack of integration between the different sources and built-in decision-making rules. Decisions can be reached with knowledge bases, which, unlike databases, make it possible to store not only objects, facts and attributes but also more sophisticated patterns such as rules and axioms. The article proposes an ontology-based method for knowledge base creation that allows for the simultaneous integration of semi-structured data sources and extendibility while remaining context independent. At the initial steps of the method, data specification should be performed with the Data Sources Ontology developed by the authors. This ontology provides data structure description that forms supportive knowledge graph. The graph's schema should be mapped with the domain ontology to be populated. Finally, the data are inserted into the domain ontology according to the mapping rules. Manual input is needed during data specification and data-to-ontology schema mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes postcolonial critical realism (PCR) as an ontological framework that explains the structuring relationship between racialized, colonial discourses and the social world. Beginning with the case study of the global climate crisis, it considers how scholars and activists have made sense of the present crisis, and how their discourses reflect and reproduce the climate crisis at large. To theorize the relationship between racialized, power-laden discourses and material reality, it derives five tenets of PCR: first, colonial discourses underlie, and interact with, material structures; second, coloniality is global and made visible through differential events and experiences; third, subaltern lived experiences reveal the nature of reality at large; fourth, coloniality is power-laden, sticky, and often invisible; and finally, decolonization must target all three domains of the social world and their interactions. The article concludes by considering how this framework might enrich anticolonial thought in the social sciences, as well as social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The epistemological challenges of the Anthropocene trouble distinctions of solid and fluid. In this contribution, the author proposes, after Gabrielle Hecht, that the nuclearity of the Anthropocene contributes significantly to destabilising these categories. Nuclear materials and ideas of nuclearity force (re)consideration of deep timescales and imperceptible processes, problematising fixed material ontologies. The article engages with nuclear matters and queries the logic of solids and fluids by developing the notion of elemental memory. An attention to elemental memory – an element's capacity to auto-affect over time – reveals the inadequacy of terms like solid and fluid, and highlights the expressiveness of solid fluid substances. Empirically, the author demonstrates, first, how elemental memory informs the solid-fluid processuality of radioactive glasses, especially trinitite. Second, engaging with the work of artists Mari Keto and Erich Berger, she addresses the slow auto-transformations of radioactive minerals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How must we understand and conceptualize the rationales and repercussions of remote warfare? This article contributes to scholarship on the ontology of remote war by analysing how Dutch officials engage with responsibility for the bombardment of an Islamic State weapons factory in Hawija, Iraq in 2015 under Operation Inherent Resolve. It observes that the main feature of Dutch officials' accounts of Hawija is their diverse claims to not knowing about civilian casualties. Official narratives shifted from denial to secrecy to strategic ignorance. Bridging work on secrecy from the field of critical security studies with work on strategic 'unknowing' from ignorance studies, we propose a new take on the Foucauldian notion of 'regimes of truth'. The regimes of truth that emerge to justify shifts to remote warfare – that it is riskless, precise and caring for civilian others – rely not merely on secrecy and denial but on feigned and imposed ignorance about casualties. Whereas denial can be disproven and secrecy has an expiration date, ignorance is more elusive and open-ended and hence politically convenient in different ways. Deliberate unknowing does not just postpone investigation and accountability but fundamentally and indefinitely obstructs it and thus sustains the regimes of truth for future remote wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A universal knowledge base can be defined as a domain-independent ontology containing instances. Ontologies define the concepts and relations among these concepts and are used to represent a domain of interest. These universal knowledge bases are the elementary units for automated reasoning on the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is an extension of the World Wide Web which facilitates software agents to share content beyond the limitations of applications and websites. This survey focuses on the most prominent automatically constructed universal knowledge bases including KnowItAll, DBpedia, YAGO, NELL, Probase, BabelNet and Knowledge Vault. We take a closer look at how these knowledge bases are built, in particular at the information extraction and taxonomy generation process and investigate how they are used in practical applications. Due to quality concerns, the most successful and widely employed knowledge bases are manually constructed to maintain high quality, but they suffer from low coverage, high assembly and quality assurance cost. On the contrary, automatic approaches for building knowledge bases try to overcome these drawbacks. Although it is strenuous to achieve the same level of quality as for manual knowledge bases, we found that the surveyed automatically constructed knowledge bases have shown promising results and are useful for many real-world applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]