Just to paste my answer below yours since I agree:
There’s “ontology” and there’s “an ontology.”
Ontology with no “an” is the study of what exists. It’s a genre of philosophy questions. However, around here we don’t really worry about it too much.
What you’ll often see on LW is “an ontology,” or “my ontology” or “the ontology used by this model.” In this usage, an ontology is a set of building blocks used in a model of the world. It’s the foundational stuff that other stuff is made out of or described in terms of.
E.g. minecraft has “an ontology,” which is the basic set of blocks (and their internal states if applicable), plus a 3-D grid model of space.
Hm, I think I see. Thanks. But what about abstract things? Things that never boil down to the physical. Like “probability”. Would the concept of probability be something that would belong to someone’s ontology?
It could be! People don’t use the same model of the world all the time. E.g. when talking about my living room I might treat a “chair” as a basic object, even though I could also talk about the atoms making up the chair if prompted to think differently.
When talking about math, people readily reason using ontologies where mathematical objects are the basic building blocks. E.g. “four is next to five.” But if talking about tables and chairs, statements like “this chair has four legs” don’t need to use “four” as part of the ontology, the “four-ness” is just describing a pattern in the actual ontologically basic stuff (chair-legs).
Just to paste my answer below yours since I agree:
There’s “ontology” and there’s “an ontology.”
Ontology with no “an” is the study of what exists. It’s a genre of philosophy questions. However, around here we don’t really worry about it too much.
What you’ll often see on LW is “an ontology,” or “my ontology” or “the ontology used by this model.” In this usage, an ontology is a set of building blocks used in a model of the world. It’s the foundational stuff that other stuff is made out of or described in terms of.
E.g. minecraft has “an ontology,” which is the basic set of blocks (and their internal states if applicable), plus a 3-D grid model of space.
Hm, I think I see. Thanks. But what about abstract things? Things that never boil down to the physical. Like “probability”. Would the concept of probability be something that would belong to someone’s ontology?
It could be! People don’t use the same model of the world all the time. E.g. when talking about my living room I might treat a “chair” as a basic object, even though I could also talk about the atoms making up the chair if prompted to think differently.
When talking about math, people readily reason using ontologies where mathematical objects are the basic building blocks. E.g. “four is next to five.” But if talking about tables and chairs, statements like “this chair has four legs” don’t need to use “four” as part of the ontology, the “four-ness” is just describing a pattern in the actual ontologically basic stuff (chair-legs).