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This article
is about ontology in philosophy. For the concept in information science, see ontology (information science).
Parmenides
was among the first to propose an ontological characterization of the
fundamental nature of reality.
Ontology (from the Greek
ὄν, genitive ὄντος: of being
(neuter participle of εἶναι: to be) and -λογία,
-logia:
science, study, theory) is the philosophical
study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, 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 deals with questions concerning
what entities
exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related
within a hierarchy,
and subdivided according to similarities and differences.
Contents[hide] |
Students of the Greek philosopher Aristotle
(384 BC – 322 BC) first used the word 'metaphysica' (literally "after the
physical") to refer to what their teacher described as "the science
of being qua being" - later known as ontology. 'Qua'
means 'in the capacity of'. Hence, ontology is inquiry into being in so much
as it is being, or into being in general, beyond any particular
thing which is or exists; and the study of beings insofar as they exist, and not insofar
as, for instance, particular facts obtained about them or particular properties relating to them. More specifically, ontology concerns determining whether some
categories of being
are fundamental, and asks in what sense the items in those categories can be
said to "be".
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,
there are also a variety of other
positions; but any ontology must give an account of which words refer to
entities, which do not, why, and what categories result. When one applies this
process to nouns such as electrons, energy, contract, happiness,
space, time, truth, causality,
and God,
ontology becomes fundamental to many branches of philosophy.
The principal questions
of ontology are "What can be said to exist?" and "Into what
categories, if any, can we sort existing things?" Various philosophers
have provided different answers to these questions.
One common approach is to divide
the extant entities into groups called categories.
Of course, such lists of categories differ widely from one another, and it is
through the co-ordination of different categorial schemes that ontology relates
to such fields as library science and artificial intelligence.
Further examples of ontological
questions include:
Quintessential ontological concepts include:
While the etymology is
Greek, the oldest extant record of the word itself is the Latin form ontologia,
which appeared in 1606, in the work Ogdoas Scholastica by Jacob
Lorhard (Lorhardus) and in 1613 in the Lexicon philosophicum
by Rudolf Göckel (Goclenius).
The first occurrence in English
of "ontology" as recorded by the OED (Oxford English Dictionary,
second edition, 1989) appears in Bailey’s dictionary of 1721, which defines
ontology as ‘an Account of being in the Abstract’ - though, of course, such an
entry indicates the term was already in use at the time. It is likely the word
was first used in its Latin form by philosophers based on the Latin roots,
which themselves are based on the Greek. The current on-line edition of the OED
(Draft Revision September 2008) gives as first occurrence in English 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 -
Parmenides
was among the first to propose an ontological characterization of the
fundamental nature of reality. In his prologue or proem
he describes two views of reality; initially that change
is impossible, and therefore existence is eternal. Consequently our opinions about reality must often be
false and deceitful. Most of western philosophy, and science
- including the fundamental concepts of falsifiability
and the conservation of energy - have emerged
from this view. This posits that existence is what exists, and that there is
nothing that does not exist. Hence, there can be neither void nor vacuum; and
true reality can neither come into being nor vanish from existence. Rather, the
entirety of creation is limitless, eternal, uniform, and immutable. Parmenides
thus posits that change, as perceived in everyday experience, is illusory.
Everything that we can apprehend is but one part of a single entity. This idea
somewhat anticipates the modern concept of an ultimate grand unification theory that finally
explains all of reality in terms of one inter-related sub-atomic
reality which applies to everything.[citation needed]
The opposite of eleatic monism is the pluralistic conception of Being. In the 5th
century BC, Anaxagoras
& Leucippus
replaced[citation needed] the reality of
Being (unique and unchanging) with the Becoming and
therefore by a more fundamental and elementary ontic plurality. This thesis
originated in the Greek-ion 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, which dealt with reality as based on the vacuum, the atoms
and their intrinsic movement in it.
The materialist Atomism
proposed by Leucippus
was indeterminist,
but then developed by Democritus in deterministic
sense. It was later (4th century BC) that the originary atomism was taken again
as indeterministic by Epicurus. He confirmed the reality as composed of an infinity of indivisible, inchangeable 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 (Aristotle, Metaphysics, I , 4,
985). 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 determinated 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 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
(‘participate in’) 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).
Ontology as an explicit
discipline was inaugurated by Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, as the study of that which is
common to all things which exist, and of the categorisation of the diverse
senses in which things can and do exist. What exists, in so far as Aristotle
concludes, are a plurality of independently existing substances
– roughly, physical objects – on which the existence of other things, such as qualities or
relations, may depend; and of which substances consist both of a form (e.g. a
shape, pattern, or organisation), and of a matter formed (Hylomorphism).
Disagreeing with Plato, who taught that frameworks or Forms
have an existence of their own, Aristotle holds that universals do not have an
existence over and above the particular things which instantiate them.-
René
Descartes, with "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.
Certainty about the existence of
"the self" and "the other", however, came under increasing
criticism in the 20th century. Sociological theorists, most notably George Herbert Mead and Erving
Goffman, saw the Cartesian Other as a "Generalized Other",
the imaginary audience that individuals use when thinking about the self.
According to Mead, "we do not assume there is a self to
begin with. Self is not presupposed as a stuff out of which the world arises.
Rather the self arises in the world" [2][3]
The Cartesian Other was also used by Sigmund
Freud, who saw the superego as an abstract regulatory force, and
Emile
Durkheim who viewed this as a psychologically manifested entity which
represented God in society at large.
Schools of subjectivism, objectivism and relativism
existed at various times in the 20th century, and the postmodernists
and body philosophers tried to reframe all these
questions in terms of bodies taking some specific action in an environment. This relied to a
great degree on insights derived from scientific research into animals taking
instinctive action in natural and artificial settings — as studied by biology, ecology, and cognitive
science.
The processes by which bodies
related to environments became of great concern, and the idea of being itself became
difficult to really define. What did people mean when they said "A is
B", "A must be B", "A was B"...? Some linguists
advocated dropping the verb "to be" from the English language,
leaving "E Prime",
supposedly less prone to bad abstractions. Others, mostly philosophers, tried
to dig into the word and its usage. Heidegger
attempted to distinguish being and existence. Heidegger
suggests that our way of being human and the way the world is for us are given
by the ontological assumptions that come along with our language. These assumptions
provide the context for communication: a horizon of unspoken background
meanings. Because these assumptions both generate and are regenerated in our
everyday interactions, the locus of our way of being is the communicative event
of language in use.[2]