The ontological and epistemological positions adopted by information systems design methods are incommensurable when pushed to their extremes. Information systems research has therefore tended to focus on the similarities between different positions, usually in search of a single, unifying position. However, by focusing on the similarities, the clarity of argument provided by any one philosophi...

In (McCarthy and Hayes 1969), we proposed dividing the artificial intelligence problem into two parts—an epistemological part and a heuristic part. This lecture further explains this division, explains some of the epistemological problems, and presents some new results and approaches. The epistemological part of AI studies what kinds of facts about the world are available to an observer with gi...

The aim of this essay is to analyze the role of quantum mechanics as an inherent characteristic of life. During the last ten years the problem of the origin of life has become an innovative research subject approached by many authors. The essay is divided in to three parts: the first deals with the problem of life from a philosophical and biological perspective. The second presents the conceptu...

AIM This study explores and extends some recent Foucauldian critiques of reflection and clinical supervision in nursing. BACKGROUND Although reflection is often accepted uncritically, several writers have claimed that it is being employed (albeit perhaps unwittingly) as a management tool to facilitate the governmentality of the workforce by establishing conditions whereby so-called reflective...

The structure of human cognition and the means apprehension is suitable only for partly gradually conceiving reality. This limitation has led to a certain distance between appearance that there will always be gap judgments mind about external world its contents, which are entities, cases, facts, states. partiality partiteness understanding produced truth-maker problem with regard judgments. Mus...

Reflexivity lies at the heart of this thesis: I seek to understand to have knowledge of a particular way of knowing. There are echoes of this reflexivity in my literature review of embodied cognition, where I discussed attempts to think about how we think. This reflexive circle need not be 'vicious', in the sense of tying me into a knot of self-reference, if I apply the tools of phenomenology a...

This paper examines the development of a conceptual model that defines Shell’s information requirements the Downstream Data Model (DDM). The model has its roots in a framework based on the notion of ontological commitment and the focus of the analysis seeks to provide useful insights into the metaphysical aspects relevant to the creation and deployment of the DDM – primarily that related to the...