2 April 2007, Languages of Medicine, Prof. Barry Smith

Increasingly, medical science rests on biological discoveries about cells, genes and proteins. Increasingly, medical science rests on the processing by computers of large bodies of data deriving from new diagnostic techniques. But serious problems arise when biologists and clinical researchers need to communicate, and these problems are compounded wherever computers are involved. We will show how these problems overlap with some of the traditional concerns of the philosophy of language, and how philosophers are working with biomedical researchers to contribute to their solution.

Prof. Barry Smith is Julian Park Professor of Philosophy at SUNY in Buffalo, and Director of the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science at the University of Saarbruecken. He is also Scientific Director of the European Centre for Ontological Research.

For more information, please contact rosja.mastop at phil.uu.nl