Ontology

Ontology, the philosophical study of being in general, or of what applies neutrally to everything that is real. It was called “first philosophy” by Aristotle in Book IV of his Metaphysics. The Latin term ontologia (“science of being”) was felicitously invented by the German philosopher Jacob Lorhard (Lorhardus) and first appeared in his work Ogdoas Scholastica (1st ed.) in 1606. It entered general circulation after being popularized by the German rationalist philosopher Christian Wolff in his Latin writings, especially Philosophia Prima sive Ontologia (1730; “First Philosophy or Ontology”).

History and scope

Wolff contrasted ontology, or general metaphysics, which applied to all things, with special metaphysical theories such as those of the soul, of bodies, or of God. Wolff claimed that ontology was an a priori discipline that could reveal the essences of things, a view strongly criticized later in the 18th century by David Hume and Immanuel Kant. In the early 20th century the term was adopted by the German founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, who called Wolff’s general metaphysics “formal ontology” and contrasted it with special “regional ontologies,” such as the ontologies of nature, mathematics, mind, culture, and religion. After renewed criticism and eclipse under the antimetaphysical movement known as logical positivism, ontology was revived in the mid-20th century by the American philosopher W.V.O. Quine. By the end of the century, largely as the result of Quine’s work, it had regained its status as a central discipline of philosophy.

The history of ontology has consisted largely of a set of fundamental, often long-running and implacable disputes about what there is, accompanied by reflections about the discipline’s own methods, status, and fundamental concepts—e.g., being, existence, identity, essence, possibility, part, one, object, property, relation, fact, and world. In a typical ontological dispute, one group of philosophers affirms the existence of some category of object (realists), while another group denies that there are such things (antirealists). Such categories have included abstract or ideal Forms, universals, immaterial minds, a mind-independent world, possible but not actual objects, essences, free will, and God. Much of the history of philosophy is in fact a history of ontological disputes.

Once they have been brought into the open, ontological disputes tend to concentrate on questions of several recurrent kinds. The fundamental question, of course, has the form, “Are there Xs?” or “Do Xs exist?” Negative answers to the fundamental question are accompanied by attempts to explain away any appearances to the effect that there are such things. If the question is answered affirmatively, there are subsequent questions. Do Xs exist independently of minds and languages (objectively), or do they depend on them in some way (subjectively or intersubjectively)? Are they discovered or created? Are they basic, irreducible constituents of reality, or can they be reduced to others? For example, in the millennia-long dispute about universals, realists have affirmed mind-independent universals, whether existing apart or only in things; conceptualists have taken universals to be mental or mind-created entities; moderate nominalists such as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) have taken them to be words or linguistic entities; and extreme nominalists have denied that there are any universals at all. Among modern Platonists, some take universals to be basic or sui generis, while others take them to be reducible to sets.

In general, a philosopher who believes in many fundamentally different kinds of object has a rich ontology, and one who believes in only a few kinds of object has a sparse ontology. Rich ontologists include Plato, who recognized immaterial Forms as well as material bodies, and the Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong (1853–1920), who embraced merely possible and even impossible objects alongside actual objects. Sparse ontologists include William of Ockham (c. 1285–1347), who accepted only qualities, or properties, and the substances in which they inhere, as well as a few relations; and Quine, who accepted only things (material bodies) and mathematical sets, professing an ontological taste for “desert landscapes.”

Methods

The methods of ontology vary according to the extent to which the ontologist wishes to rely upon other disciplines and the nature of the disciplines he wishes to rely upon. The most common method since the 20th century, the logical or linguistic method, relied upon theories of meaning or reference—as applied to either artificial logical languages or to natural languages—to dictate the kinds of entity that exist. Typically, lists of basic categories reflecting this method tended to correspond closely to broad linguistic (or syntactic) categories—e.g., substance (noun), property (adjective), relation (transitive verb), and state of affairs (sentence). A shortcoming of the logico-linguistic method, however, is that it is generally possible to change the ontology it produces by varying the semantic analysis of the natural or formal language in question.

Other ontological methods have been based on phenomenology (Husserl, Meinong), on the analysis of human existence, or Dasein (Martin Heidegger), and on epistemology. Husserl and Meinong contended that the basic categories of objects mirror the various kinds of mental activity by which they are grasped. Thus, there must be four basic kinds of objects corresponding to the mental activities of ideation, judgment, feeling, and desire. Heidegger held that it is a mistake to base the ontology of human existence on Aristotelian concepts such as matter and form, which are suitable only for artifacts.

The most widely used linguistic criterion of existence is due to Quine, who coined the slogan “To be is to be the value of a variable.” According to Quine, the propositions of a scientific theory should first be expressed in terms of predicate logic, or the predicate calculus, a logical language consisting of names, variables (which may be substituted for names), predicates (or properties), logical connectives (such as and, or, and if…then), and quantifiers. (Quantifiers can be combined with predicates and variables to form sentences equivalent to “Everything has such and such a property” and “There is at least one thing that has such and such a property.”) The scientific theory is then ontologically “committed” to those classes of entity whose members must be capable of replacing variables (i.e., capable of being the value of a variable) if the sentences of the theory are to be true.

Quine rejected any primacy for ontology, claiming that ontological categories should be suggested by natural science. Yet this did not prevent him from sometimes intervening on an apparently ad hoc basis to reduce the ontological commitments of classes of scientific theories to those of his minimal ontology of things and sets. His streamlining of scientific ontology to the minimum needed to keep the structure of scientific discourse intact led him to the doctrine of “ontological relativity,” according to which there is no privileged category of objects to which a given scientific theory is ontologically committed.

In contrast to Quine, philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) in England and David Armstrong in Australia regarded ontology as a core philosophical discipline that cannot depend to such a decisive extent on any other philosophical or scientific study. Its results can be evaluated only in terms of the adequacy of the overall system in the light of experience.

Peter+M. Simons