document.181

Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology often deals with questions concerning what entities exist or may be said to exist, and how such entities may be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences. Although ontology as a philosophical enterprise is highly theoretical, it also has practical application in information science and technology, such as ontology engineering.

In analytic philosophy, ontology deals with the determination whether categories of being are fundamental and discusses in what sense the items in those categories may be said to "be". It is the inquiry into being in so much as it is being ("being qua being"), or into beings insofar as they exist—and not insofar as (for instance) particular facts may be obtained about them or particular properties belong to them.[citation needed]
Some philosophers, notably of the Platonic school, contend that all nouns (including abstract nouns) refer to existent entities. Other philosophers contend that nouns do not always name entities, but that some provide a kind of shorthand for reference to a collection of either objects or events. In this latter view, mind, instead of referring to an entity, refers to a collection of mental events experienced by a person; society refers to a collection of persons with some shared characteristics, and geometry refers to a collection of a specific kind of intellectual activity.[1] Between these poles of realism and nominalism, stand a variety of other positions. An ontology may give an account of which words refer to entities, which do not, why, and what categories result.[citation needed]
Some fundamental questions[edit]
Principal questions of ontology include:
"What can be said to exist?"
"What is a thing?"[2]
"Into what categories, if any, can we sort existing things?"
"What are the meanings of being?"
"What are the various modes of being of entities?"
Various philosophers have provided different answers to these questions. One common approach involves dividing the extant subjects and predicates into groups called categories. Of course, such lists of categories differ widely from one another, and it is through the co-ordination of different categorical schemes that ontology relates to such fields as library science and artificial intelligence. Such an understanding of ontological categories, however, is merely taxonomic, classificatory. Aristotle's categories are the ways in which a being may be addressed simply as a being, such as:
what it is (its 'whatness', quidditas or essence)
how it is (its 'howness' or qualitativeness)
how much it is (quantitativeness)
where it is, its relatedness to other beings[3]
Further examples of ontological questions include:[citation needed]
What is existence, i.e. what does it mean for a being to be?
Is existence a property?
Is existence a genus or general class that is simply divided up by specific differences?
Which entities, if any, are fundamental?
Are all entities objects?
How do the properties of an object relate to the object itself?
Do physical properties actually exist?
What features are the essential, as opposed to merely accidental attributes of a given object?
How many levels of existence or ontological levels are there? And what constitutes a "level"?
What is a physical object?
Can one give an account of what it means to say that a physical object exists?
Can one give an account of what it means to say that a non-physical entity exists?
What constitutes the identity of an object?
When does an object go out of existence, as opposed to merely changing?
Do beings exist other than in the modes of objectivity and subjectivity, i.e. is the subject/object split of modern philosophy inevitable?
Concepts[edit]
Essential ontological dichotomies include:
universals and particulars
substance and accident
abstract and concrete objects
essence and existence
determinism and indeterminism
monism and dualism
idealism and materialism
Types[edit]
Philosophers can classify ontologies in various ways using criteria such as the degree of abstraction and field of application:[4]
Upper ontology: concepts supporting development of an ontology, meta-ontology
Domain ontology: concepts relevant to a particular topic or area of interest, for example, information technology or computer languages, or particular branches of science
Interface ontology: concepts relevant to the juncture of two disciplines
Process ontology: inputs, outputs, constraints, sequencing information, involved in business or engineering processes
History[edit]
Etymology[edit]
The compound word ontology combines onto-, from the Greek ὄν, on (gen. ὄντος, ontos), i.e. "being; that which is", which is the present participle of the verb εἰμί, eimí, i.e. "to be, I am", and -λογία, -logia, i.e. "science, study, theory".[5][6]
While the etymology is Greek, the oldest extant record of the word itself, the New Latin form ontologia, appeared in 1606 in the work Ogdoas Scholastica by Jacob Lorhard (Lorhardus) and in 1613 in the Lexicon philosophicum by Rudolf Göckel (Goclenius); see classical compounds for this type of word formation.[citation needed]
The first occurrence in English of ontology as recorded by the OED (Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, 2008) came in a work by Gideon Harvey (1636/7–1702): Archelogia philosophica nova; or, New principles of Philosophy. Containing Philosophy in general, Metaphysicks or Ontology, Dynamilogy or a Discourse of Power, Religio Philosophi or Natural Theology, Physicks or Natural philosophy, London, Thomson, 1663. The word was first used in its Latin form by philosophers based on the Latin roots, which themselves are based on the Greek.
Leibniz is the only one of the great philosophers of the 17th century to have used the term ontology.[7]
Origins[edit]
Ontology was referred to as Tattva Mimamsa by ancient Indian philosophers going back as early as Vedas.[citation needed]
Parmenides and monism[edit]
Parmenides was among the first in the Greek tradition to propose an ontological characterization of the fundamental nature of existence. In his prologue or proem he describes two views of existence; initially that nothing comes from nothing, and therefore existence is eternal. Consequently, our opinions about truth must often be false and deceitful. Most of western philosophy — including the fundamental concepts of falsifiability — have emerged from this view. This posits that existence is what may be conceived of by thought, created, or possessed. Hence, there may be neither void nor vacuum; and true reality neither may come into being nor vanish from existence. Rather, the entirety of creation is eternal, uniform, and immutable, though not infinite (he characterized its shape as that of a perfect sphere). Parmenides thus posits that change, as perceived in everyday experience, is illusory. Everything that may be apprehended is but one part of a single entity. This idea somewhat anticipates the modern concept of an ultimate grand unification theory that finally describes all of existence in terms of one inter-related sub-atomic reality which applies to everything.[citation needed]
Ontological pluralism[edit]
Main article: Ontological pluralism
The opposite of eleatic monism is the pluralistic conception of Being. In the 5th century BC, Anaxagoras and Leucippus replaced[8] the reality of Being (unique and unchanging) with that of Becoming and therefore by a more fundamental and elementary ontic plurality. This thesis originated in the Hellenic world, stated in two different ways by Anaxagoras and by Leucippus. The first theory dealt with "seeds" (which Aristotle referred to as "homeomeries") of the various substances. The second was the atomistic theory,[9] which dealt with reality as based on the vacuum, the atoms and their intrinsic movement in it.[citation needed]
The materialist atomism proposed by Leucippus was indeterminist, but then developed by Democritus in a deterministic way. It was later (4th century BC) that the original atomism was taken again as indeterministic by Epicurus. He confirmed the reality as composed of an infinity of indivisible, unchangeable corpuscles or atoms (atomon, lit. 'uncuttable'), but he gives weight to characterize atoms while for Leucippus they are characterized by a "figure", an "order" and a "position" in the cosmos.[10] They are, besides, creating the whole with the intrinsic movement in the vacuum, producing the diverse flux of being. Their movement is influenced by the parenklisis (Lucretius names it clinamen) and that is determined by the chance. These ideas foreshadowed our understanding of traditional physics until the nature of atoms was discovered in the 20th century.[citation needed]
Plato[edit]
Plato developed this distinction between true reality and illusion, in arguing that what is real are eternal and unchanging Forms or Ideas (a precursor to universals), of which things experienced in sensation are at best merely copies, and real only in so far as they copy ('partake of') such Forms. In general, Plato presumes that all nouns (e.g., 'Beauty') refer to real entities, whether sensible bodies or insensible Forms. Hence, in The Sophist Plato argues that Being is a Form in which all existent things participate and which they have in common (though it is unclear whether 'Being' is intended in the sense of existence, copula, or identity); and argues, against Parmenides, that Forms must exist not only of Being, but also of Negation and of non-Being (or Difference).
In his Categories, Aristotle identifies ten possible kinds of things that may be the subject or the predicate of a proposition. For Aristotle there are four different ontological dimensions:[citation needed]
according to the various categories or ways of addressing a being as such
according to its truth or falsity (e.g. fake gold, counterfeit money)
whether it exists in and of itself or simply 'comes along' by accident
according to its potency, movement (energy) or finished presence (Metaphysics Book Theta).
According to Avicenna, and in an interpretation of Greek Aristotelian and Platonist ontological doctrines in medieval metaphysics, being is either necessary, contingent qua possible, or impossible. Necessary being is that which cannot but be, since its non-being entails a contradiction. Contingent qua possible being is neither necessary nor impossible for it to be or not to be. It is ontologically neutral, and is brought from potential existing into actual existence by way of a cause that is external to its essence. Its being is borrowed unlike the necessary existent, which is self-subsisting and is impossible for it not to be. As for the impossible, it necessarily does not exist, and the affirmation of its being is a contradiction.[11]
Other ontological topics[edit]
Ontological formations[edit]
The concept of 'ontological formations' refers to formations of social relations understood as dominant ways of living. Temporal, spatial, corporeal, epistemological and performative relations are taken to be central to understanding a dominant formation. That is, a particular ontological formation is based on how ontological categories of time, space, embodiment, knowing and performing are lived—objectively and subjectively. Different ontological formations include the customary (including the tribal), the traditional, the modern and the postmodern. The concept was first introduced by Paul James' Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism[12] together with a series of writers including Damian Grenfell and Manfred Steger.
In the engaged theory approach, ontological formations are seen as layered and intersecting rather than singular formations. They are 'formations of being'. This approach avoids the usual problems of a Great Divide being posited between the modern and the pre-modern.
Ontological and epistemological certainty[edit]
René Descartes, with "je pense donc je suis" or "cogito ergo sum" or "I think, therefore I am", argued that "the self" is something that we can know exists with epistemological certainty. Descartes argued further that this knowledge could lead to a proof of the certainty of the existence of God, using the ontological argument that had been formulated first by Anselm of Canterbury.