Ontology is how we make sense of the world. We make judgements about our observations and slice up the world into buckets we can drop our observations into.
However I’ve been thinking lately that the way we normally model ontology is insufficient. We tend to talk as if ontology is all one thing, one map of the territory. Maybe these can be very complex, multi-manifold maps that permit shifting perspectives, but one map all the same.
We see some hints at the breaking of this ontology of ontology as a single map by noticing the way some people, myself included, have noticed you can hold multiple, contradictory ontologies and switch between them. And with further development there’s no switching, it just all is, only complex and with multiple projections that overlap.
But there’s more. What we’ve been talking about here has mostly been a “strong” form of ontology that seeks to say something about the being of the world, to reify it into type-objects that can be considered, but there’s also a “weak” kind of ontology from which ontology arises and which can exist without the “strong” version. It’s the ontology that I referenced at the start of the post, the ontology of discrimination and nothing else. So much of ontology is taking the discrimination and turning it into a full-fledged model or map, but there’s a weak notion of ontology that exists even if all we do is draw lines where we see borders.
I can’t recall seeing much on this in Western philosophy; I thought about this after combining my reading of Western philosophy with my reading of Buddhist philosophy and what it has to say about how mental activity arises. But Buddhist philosophy doesn’t have a strong notion of ontology the way Western philosophy does, so maybe it’s not surprising this subtle point has gone missed.
Strong and Weak Ontology
Ontology is how we make sense of the world. We make judgements about our observations and slice up the world into buckets we can drop our observations into.
However I’ve been thinking lately that the way we normally model ontology is insufficient. We tend to talk as if ontology is all one thing, one map of the territory. Maybe these can be very complex, multi-manifold maps that permit shifting perspectives, but one map all the same.
We see some hints at the breaking of this ontology of ontology as a single map by noticing the way some people, myself included, have noticed you can hold multiple, contradictory ontologies and switch between them. And with further development there’s no switching, it just all is, only complex and with multiple projections that overlap.
But there’s more. What we’ve been talking about here has mostly been a “strong” form of ontology that seeks to say something about the being of the world, to reify it into type-objects that can be considered, but there’s also a “weak” kind of ontology from which ontology arises and which can exist without the “strong” version. It’s the ontology that I referenced at the start of the post, the ontology of discrimination and nothing else. So much of ontology is taking the discrimination and turning it into a full-fledged model or map, but there’s a weak notion of ontology that exists even if all we do is draw lines where we see borders.
I can’t recall seeing much on this in Western philosophy; I thought about this after combining my reading of Western philosophy with my reading of Buddhist philosophy and what it has to say about how mental activity arises. But Buddhist philosophy doesn’t have a strong notion of ontology the way Western philosophy does, so maybe it’s not surprising this subtle point has gone missed.