An impressive variety of theories of ontology of musical works has been offered in the last fifty years. Recently, the ontologists have been paying more attention to methodological issues, in particular, the problem of determining criteria of a good theory. Although different methodological approaches involve different views on the importance and exact role of intuitiveness of a theory, most philosophers writing on the ontology of music agree that intuitiveness and compliance with musical practice play an important part when (...) judging theories. A multitude of diverse claims exist regarding folk intuitions and matters of musical practice in the literature on the ontology of musical works. In this review paper, a systematized collection of about one hundred empirical claims extracted from the theoretical literature is presented. All of the empirical claims are categorized thematically. The paper also includes a short discussion on the role of appeals to common intuitions in methodological literature, as well as some suggestions for future research. (shrink)

The paper begins with a more carefully stated version of ontologically neutral (ON) logic, originally introduced in (Hailperin, 1997). A non-infinitistic semantics which includes a definition of potential infinite validity follows. It is shown, without appeal to the actual infinite, that this notion provides a necessary and sufficient condition for provability in ON logic.

This volume presents a systematic philosophical theory related to the collectivism-versus-individualism debate in the social sciences. A weak version of collectivism (the "we-mode" approach) that depends on group-based collective intentionality is developed in the book. The we-mode approach is used to account for collective intention and action, cooperation, group attitudes, social practices and institutions as well as group solidarity.

The Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) is a suite of interoperable ontology modules that aims to provide coverage of all aspects of the infectious disease domain, including biomedical research, clinical care, and public health. IDO Core is designed to be a disease and pathogen neutral ontology, covering just those types of entities and relations that are relevant to infectious diseases generally. IDO Core is then extended by a collection of ontology modules focusing on specific diseases and pathogens. (...) In this paper we present applications of IDO Core within various areas of infectious disease research, together with an overview of all IDO extension ontologies and the methodology on the basis of which they are built. We also survey recent developments involving IDO, including the creation of IDO Virus; the Coronaviruses Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO); and an extension of CIDO focused on COVID-19 (IDO-CovID-19).We also discuss how these ontologies might assist in information-driven efforts to deal with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, to accelerate data discovery in the early stages of future pandemics, and to promote reproducibility of infectious disease research. (shrink)

A systematic treatment of Hume's conception of imagination in all the main topics of his philosophy.

The suggestions outlined here include the following. Money is a bundle of institutionally sustained causal powers. Money is an institutional universal instantiated in generic currencies and particular money tokens. John Searle’s account of institutional facts is not helpful for understanding the nature of money as an institution (while it may help to illuminate aspects of the nature of currencies and money particulars). The money universal is not a social convention in David Lewis’s sense (while currencies and money particulars are characterized (...) by high degrees of conventionality). The existence of the money universal is dependent on a larger institutional structure and cannot be understood in terms of collective belief or acceptance or agreement separately focusing on money. These claims have important implications for realism about money. (shrink)

Truth and Ontology concludes that some truths do not depend on being in any substantive way at all.

In this paper I examine Grace A. de Laguna’s theory of universals in its historical context and in relation to contemporary debates in analytic metaphysics. I explain the central features of her theory, arguing that her theory should be classified as a form of immanent realism and as a powers ontology. I then show in what ways her theory affords a theory of modality in terms of potentialities and discuss some of its consequences along the way.

"Social ontology, conventionally defined, is not primarily about us. Rather, it is about the social world (or worlds), about social reality (or realities), or about the domain(s) of social facts. Social ontology aims at providing an inventory of the basic kinds of entities that make up the social world(s) - items such as norms, institutions, social practices, status positions, power structures, and artifacts. It is the study of the basic kinds of properties of these entities, and of how (...) the social world exists, how it is constituted, or constructed"--. (shrink)

The work of Gregory Bateson offers a metaphysical basis for a “process psychology,” that is, a view of psychological practice and research guided by an ontology of becoming—identifying change, difference, and relationship as the basic elements of a foundational metaphysics. This article explores the relevance of Bateson's recursive epistemology, his re-conception of the Great Chain of Being, a first-principles approach to defining the nature of mind, and understandings of interaction and difference, pattern and symmetry, interpretation and context. Bateson's philosophical (...) contributions will be drawn into relationship with Wittgenstein's philosophy of language as use, Melnyk's theory of causal levels of explanation, Korzybski's account of map and territory, the rejection of the heuristic rigidity of substantialist ontologies, and a cybernetics communication science-informed approach to contextual bi-directionality of causality. We thereby arrive at an understanding of Bateson's process psychology that, given its ecological-systemic nature, is explanatorily applicable across the mind sciences. This process psychology equips us to answer the question: What is mind? Not by explanatory appeal to substantial entities contained within mind, but instead by recourse to the contextually relevant patterns for understanding mind to a particular purpose. We have thereby attended to the gulf between heuristics and fundamentals, between psychological models and an onto-epistemic account of reality. Insufficient attention has been given to characterising the vital nature of Bateson's philosophical oeuvre to psychological practice. This article draws out Bateson's relevance to establishing foundational principles for a process psychology capable of reinvigorating psychological thought. (shrink)

The seventeenth century was a period of extraordinary invention, discovery and revolutions in scientific, social and political orders. It was a time of expansive automation, biological discovery, rapid advances in medical knowledge, of animal trials and a questioning of the boundaries between species, human and non-human, between social classes, and of the assumed naturalness of political inequality. This book gives a tour through those objects, ordinary and extraordinary, which captivated the philosophical imagination of the single most important French philosopher of (...) this period, Rene Descartes. Deborah J. Brown and Calvin G. Normore document Descartes' attempt to make sense of the complex, composite objects of human and divine invention, consistent with the fundamental tenets of his metaphysical system. Their central argument is that, far from reducing all the categories of ordinary experience to the two basic categories of substance, mind and body, Descartes' philosophy recognises irreducible composites that resist reduction, and require their own distinctive modes of explanation. (shrink)

The book investigates how Avicenna's doctrine of efficient causality relates to his general ontology, as well as how the two are interpreted, defended, and challenged in the early phase of Avicenna's Islamic reception (the eleventh and twelfth centuries).

I argue that the wave function ontology for quantum mechanics is an undesirable ontology. This ontology holds that the fundamental space in which entities evolve is not three-dimensional, but instead 3N-dimensional, where N is the number of particles standardly thought to exist in three-dimensional space. I show that the state of three-dimensional objects does not supervene on the state of objects in 3N-dimensional space. I also show that the only way to guarantee the existence of the appropriate (...) mental states in the wave function ontology has undesirable metaphysical baggage: either mind/body dualism is true, or circumstances which we take to be logically possible turn out to be logically impossible.“While our theory can be extended formally in a logically consistent way by introducing the concept of a wave in a 3N-dimensional space, it is evident that this procedure is not really acceptable in a physical theory... ” (Bohm 1957, 117). (shrink)

Twentieth-century anthropology has been operating with the assumption of one nature and many cultures, one reality experienced and lived in many different ways. Its primary job, therefore, has been to render the otherness of the other understandable, to demonstrate that although different it is also the same; in short, to show that although other, others are people like us. The latest theoretical paradigm, known as the ‘ontological turn’, appears to reverse this assumption and to posit many natures and one culture. (...) Whether it does in fact reverse it and constitutes a meta-ontology, as critics have pointed out, or it is only a heuristic, methodological device, as some of the proponents of the ‘turn’ have recently argued, the contention of my article is the same: first, this move – the ontological – is made in the hope of doing a better job in redeeming otherness than earlier anthropological paradigms; second, it fails as they did – in the same way and for the same reasons. (shrink)

[Stephen Yablo] The usual charge against Carnap's internal/external distinction is one of 'guilt by association with analytic/synthetic'. But it can be freed of this association, to become the distinction between statements made within make-believe games and those made outside them-or, rather, a special case of it with some claim to be called the metaphorical/literal distinction. Not even Quine considers figurative speech committal, so this turns the tables somewhat. To determine our ontological commitments, we have to ferret out all traces of (...) nonliterality in our assertions; if there is no sensible project of doing that, there is no sensible project of Quinean ontology. /// [Andre Gallois] I discuss Steve Yablo's defence of Carnap's distinction between internal and external questions. In the first section I set out what I take that distinction, as Carnap draws it, to be, and spell out a central motivation Carnap has for invoking it. In the second section I endorse, and augment, Yablo's response to Quine's arguments against Carnap. In the third section I say why Carnap's application of the distinction between internal and external questions runs into trouble. In the fourth section I spell out what I take to be Yablo's version of Carnap. In the last I say why that version is especially vulnerable to the objection raised in the second. (shrink)

relations between events both require a more complex structure on the domain underlying the meaning representations than is commonly assumed. This paper proposes an ontology based on such notions as causation and consequence, rather than on purely temporal primitives. A central notion in the ontology..

This review focuses on the Ogdoas scholastica by Jacob Lorhard, published in 1606. The importance of this document turns on the fact that it contains what is almost certainly the first published occurrence of the term “ontology.” The body of the work consists in a series of diagrams called “diagraphs.” Relevant features of this compendium of diagraphs are: 1. that it does not in fact contain the word “ontology,” and 2. that Lorhard himself was not responsible for its (...) content. (shrink)

I defend a one category ontology: an ontology that denies that we need more than one fundamental category to support the ontological structure of the world. Categorical fundamentality is understood in terms of the metaphysically prior, as that in which everything else in the world consists. One category ontologies are deeply appealing, because their ontological simplicity gives them an unmatched elegance and spareness. I’m a fan of a one category ontology that collapses the distinction between particular and (...) property, replacing it with a single fundamental category of intrinsic characters or qualities. We may describe the qualities as qualitative charactersor as modes, perhaps on the model of Aristotelian qualitative (nonsubstantial) kinds, and I will use the term “properties” interchangeably with “qualities”. The qualities are repeatable and reasonably sparse, although, as I discuss in section 2.6, there are empirical reasons that may suggest, depending on one’s preferred fundamental physical theory, that they include irreducibly intensive qualities. There are no uninstantiated qualities. I also assume that the fundamental qualitative natures are intrinsic, although physics may ultimately suggest that some of them are extrinsic. On my view, matter, concrete objects, abstract objects, and perhaps even spacetime are constructed from mereological fusions of qualities, so the world is simply a vast mixture of qualities, including polyadic properties (i.e., relations). This means that everything there is, including concrete objects like persons or stars, is a quality, a qualitative fusion, or a portion of the extended qualitative fusion that is the worldwhole. I call my view mereological bundle theory. (shrink)

Standard microbial evolutionary ontology is organized according to a nested hierarchy of entities at various levels of biological organization. It typically detects and defines these entities in relation to the most stable aspects of evolutionary processes, by identifying lineages evolving by a process of vertical inheritance from an ancestral entity. However, recent advances in microbiology indicate that such an ontology has important limitations. The various dynamics detected within microbiological systems reveal that a focus on the most stable entities (...) (or features of entities) over time inevitably underestimates the extent and nature of microbial diversity. These dynamics are not the outcome of the process of vertical descent alone. Other processes, often involving causal interactions between entities from distinct levels of biological organisation, or operating at different time scales, are responsible not only for the destabilisation of pre-existing entities, but also for the emergence and stabilisation of novel entities in the microbial world. In this article we consider microbial entities as more or less stabilised functional wholes, and sketch a network-based ontology that can represent a diverse set of processes including, for example, as well as phylogenetic relations, interactions that stabilise or destabilise the interacting entities, spatial relations, ecological connections, and genetic exchanges. We use this pluralistic framework for evaluating (i) the existing ontological assumptions in evolution (e.g. whether currently recognized entities are adequate for understanding the causes of change and stabilisation in the microbial world), and (ii) for identifying hidden ontological kinds, essentially invisible from within a more limited perspective. We propose to recognize additional classes of entities that provide new insights into the structure of the microbial world, namely “processually equivalent” entities, “processually versatile” entities, and “stabilized” entities. (shrink)

[Stephen Yablo] The usual charge against Carnap's internal/external distinction is one of 'guilt by association with analytic/synthetic'. But it can be freed of this association, to become the distinction between statements made within make-believe games and those made outside them-or, rather, a special case of it with some claim to be called the metaphorical/literal distinction. Not even Quine considers figurative speech committal, so this turns the tables somewhat. To determine our ontological commitments, we have to ferret out all traces of (...) nonliterality in our assertions; if there is no sensible project of doing that, there is no sensible project of Quinean ontology. /// [Andre Gallois] I discuss Steve Yablo's defence of Carnap's distinction between internal and external questions. In the first section I set out what I take that distinction, as Carnap draws it, to be, and spell out a central motivation Carnap has for invoking it. In the second section I endorse, and augment, Yablo's response to Quine's arguments against Carnap. In the third section I say why Carnap's application of the distinction between internal and external questions runs into trouble. In the fourth section I spell out what I take to be Yablo's version of Carnap. In the last I say why that version is especially vulnerable to the objection raised in the second. (shrink)

Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a top-level ontology consisting of thirty-six classes, designed to support information integration, retrieval, and analysis across all domains of scientific investigation, presently employed in over 350 ontology projects around the world. BFO is a genuine top-level ontology, containing no terms particular to material domains, such as physics, medicine, or psychology. In this paper, we demonstrate how a series of cases illustrating common types of change may be represented by universals, defined classes, (...) and relations employing the BFO framework. We provide discussion of these cases to provide a template for other ontologists using BFO, as well as to facilitate comparison with the strategies proposed by ontologists using different top-level ontologies. (shrink)

Abstract In light of the complexity of unfolding disasters, the diversity of rapidly evolving events, the enormous amount of generated information, and the huge pool of casualties, emergency responders (ERs) may be overwhelmed and in consequence poor decisions may be made. In fact, the possibility of transporting the wounded victims to one of several hospitals and the dynamic changes in healthcare resource availability make the decision process more complex. To tackle this problem, we propose a multicriteria decision support service, based (...) on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method, that aims to avoid overcrowding and outpacing the capacity of a hospital to effectively provide the best care to victims by finding out the most appropriate hospital that meets the victims’ needs. The proposed approach searches for the most appropriate healthcare institution that can effectively deal with the victims’ needs by considering the availability of the needed resources in the hospital, the victim’s wait time to receive the healthcare, and the transfer time that represents the hospital proximity to the disaster site. The evaluation and validation results showed that the assignment of hospitals was done successfully considering the needs of each victim and without overwhelming any single hospital. (shrink)

This collection does not only include articles by Raimo Tuomela and his co-authors which have been decisive in social ontology. An extensive introduction provides an account of the impact of the works, the most important debates in the field, and also addresses future issues. Thus, the book gives insights that are still viable and worthy of further scrutiny and development, making it an inspiring source for those engaged in the debates of the field today.

Epistemic reasons are mental states. They are not propositions or non-mental facts. The discussion proceeds as follows. Section 1 introduces the topic. Section 2 gives two concrete examples of how our topic directly affects the internalism/externalism debate in normative epistemology. Section 3 responds to an argument against the view that reasons are mental states. Section 4 presents two problems for the view that reasons are propositions. Section 5 presents two problems for the view that reasons are non-mental facts. Section 6 (...) argues that reasons are mental states. Section 7 responds to objections. (shrink)

Willard van Orman Quine once said that he had a preference for a desert ontology. This was in an earlier day when concerns with logical structure and ontological simplicity reigned supreme. Ontological genocide was practiced upon whole classes of upper-level or ‘derivative’ entities in the name of elegance, and we were secure in the belief that one strayed irremediably into the realm of conceptual confusion and possible error the further one got from ontic fundamentalism. In those days, one paid (...) more attention to generic worries about possible errors than to actual errors derived from distancing oneself too far from the nitty-gritty details of actual theory, actual inferences from actual data, the actual conditions under which we posited and detected entities, calibrated and ‘burned in’ instruments, identified and rejected artifacts, debugged programs and procedures, explained the mechanisms behind regularities, judged correlations to be spurious, and in general, to the real complexities and richness of actual scientific practice. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: World, Being, and Style The Work of Art as Manifesting a World The Work of Art as Articulating a Culture's Understanding of Being Heidegger: Artworks as Reconfiguring a Culture's Understanding of Being Conclusion: Can an Artwork Work for Us Now?

We are all immersed in a sea of social norms, but they are sometimes tricky to observe with any clarity. They are often invisible to us and emerge only when they are not observed. Social norms are important to understand because they are both limiting of our freedom, such as gendered and racialized norms, and at the same time the very conditions of our agency. Social Goodness presents an original, externalist answer to the question of the source or origin of (...) social role normativity. Rather than grounding social normativity in the attitudes of persons, the book argues for an externalism that roots social role normativity in the social world itself: in its positions, institutions, and larger architecture. The core insight of externalism is that the function or structural feature of an enterprise or activity can bring with it normative demands quite independently of the attitudes of those who engage with it. According to the artisanal model, just as a carpenter, ceramicist, or chef is responsive to and evaluable under a set of artisanal norms or techniques, so too is a mother and or an academic or a President. The source of normativity is this technique or expertise, independent of the preferences, endorsements, or recognitive attitudes of individuals. The artisanal model for social role normativity has resources to explain both the "stickiness" or persistence of social norms and our ability to criticize existing norms and to engage in normative self-creation--to create new normative selves. The artisanal model also has resources to capture and express the social situatedness, locality, and materiality of social roles. The relational ontology of social roles, implicit in the artisanal model, provides a useful frame to consider both hierarchical and oppressive social relations. (shrink)

The primitive ontology approach to quantum mechanics seeks to account for quantum phenomena in terms of a distribution of matter in three-dimensional space and a law of nature that describes its temporal development. This approach to explaining quantum phenomena is compatible with either a Humean or powerist account of laws. In this paper, I offer a powerist ontology in which the law is specified by Bohmian mechanics for a global configuration of particles. Unlike in other powerist ontologies, however, (...) this law is not grounded in a structural power that is instantiated by the global configuration. Instead, I combine the primitive ontology approach with Aristotle’s doctrine of hylomorphism to create a new metaphysical model, in which the cosmos is a hylomorphic substance with an intrinsic power to choreograph the trajectories of the particles. (shrink)

A review of U. Mäki (ed.). Fact and Fiction in Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. pp. xvi 384. ISBN 0521 00957. As people interested mainly in theory, methodologists and philos...

The aim of this article is to explore the problem of social ontology. The form that the exploration will take is a development of the argument that I presented in The Construction of Social Realty[2]. I will summarize some of the results of that book and then develop the ideas further.

The Growing Block Theory of time says that the metaphysical openness of the future should be understood in terms of there not being any future objects or events. But in a series of works, Ross Cameron, Elizabeth Barnes, and Robbie Williams have developed a competing view that understands metaphysical openness in terms of it being indeterminate whether there exist future objects or events. I argue that the three reasons they give for preferring their account are not compelling. And since the (...) notion of “indeterminate existence” suffers conceptual problems, the Growing Block is the preferable view. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ecumenical Relational Ontology in Dialogue with ThomismGiulio MasperoIntroduction: Challenged by a FrescoEntering the Chapel of San Brice in the right transept of the Orvieto Cathedral, a city where Thomas lived for three years, one can admire a fresco by Luca Signorelli, painted in 1500, whose subject is the doctorum sapiens ordo. Here it is possible to recognize Aquinas surrounded by a group of fourteen doctors of the Church, (...) the first row of which are St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. Gregory the Great, and St. Augustine. The bishop of Hippo is symbolically conversing with the sixth-century Pope in front of a book he is holding open, and Thomas, behind them, with his right hand raised, is leaning over Augustine. The obvious connection between the two great thinkers is thus visually highlighted. This contribution aims to stress another dimension of Aquinas's thought, starting with a reading of Thomas Joseph White's impressive volume on the Trinity.1If one were to attempt the desperate feat of encapsulating the content of this book in a few keywords, the subtitle would naturally offer the three terms "nature," "mystery," and "unity." From this perspective, the text is classic and aims to highlight certain elements that unfortunately risk remaining in the shadows in contemporary Trinitarian theology. At the same time, the analysis of the narrative proposed by the author immediately shows [End Page 509] that the intention of this reconstruction of Aquinas's Trinitarian thought is explicitly relational. In fact, absolutely non-trivial elements emerge from the historical reconstruction of his sources, such as the ontological reshaping of relation by the Cappadocians before Augustine.2 Particularly valuable is the defense of the psychological analogy, often overshadowed in the social Trinitarianism prevalent today.3 Even on the critical front, the distance from process theologies and the Rahner-inspired economic Trinity is evident and interesting in White's book.The reference to relational ontology before Augustine together with the discussion of psychological analogy suggest an approach to the volume from the perspective of Trinitarian ontology. These elements, moreover, appear particularly important from an ecumenical point of view. Hence, the proposed reading of the volume presented here will start from the absolute ontological novelty introduced both by the Cappadocians and Augustine, who, from two different perspectives, held that in divinis relationships are not accidental. We wonder here: to whom is Aquinas closer? What is the meaning of this question for ecumenism?To answer such questions, this contribution will be articulated around three dogmatic cores: (1) relation in divinis; (2) the Holy Spirit; (3) how the transition from the triune God to creation is elaborated. These three elements could be recognized behind in the following quote from White's book:Creatures resemble the Trinity, then, in a threefold way. They bear the ontological insignia of the Father insofar as each one of them is substantial and enduring. However they also refer back to him as each originates from another, and is given being. Their derived existence is itself a testimony to the gift of being, which stems ultimately from the divine paternity. Insofar as creatures are intelligible, they bear the imprint of the generated Word, through whom God made all things, and who is the source of order and intelligibility in creation. Insofar as they are good in themselves and tend toward perfection, they resemble the goodness of the Spirit, the Love in whom God has made all that is good. Human beings, who are made in the image of God, resemble the Trinity in a particularly privileged way, as persons, with immaterial faculties of intellect and will. They are able to image [End Page 510] the Trinity both individually and collectively, by spiritual communion in truth and in love.4The text describes very clearly the program of a Trinitarian ontology, without departing, however, from the spirit of Thomas. The questions that will guide this contribution would like to make possible a real dialogue with the Thomist tradition on this point, so as to foster that relational dimension that seems to structure White's synthesis itself. It is to be hoped that this will also help the ecumenical enterprise, which the postmodern crisis makes... (shrink)

The opposition between transcendentalism and naturalism plays a key role in discussions about consciousness at the confluence of phenomenology and analytical philosophy. Associated with it is a whole range of research programs. However, the opposition between transcendentalism and naturalism in these programs is, as a rule, operational and not thematic in nature and presupposes that 1) Transcendentalism and naturalism as traditions are initially alien to each other; 2) The domain of their opposition is ontology. The article attempts to problematize (...) these premises based on one historical circumstance. Turning to the texts of Kant, the founder of transcendental philosophy, I intend to show that transcendentalism, which was first substantiated in them, is a version of naturalistic ontology, that is, a peculiarly interpreted naturalism that identifies nature with its natural scientific model and excludes constituting subjectivity from ontology. It is built not on the naturalization of phenomenology, but on the transcendentalization of natural science. Reinterpreting the experimental method in the spirit of the Copernican turn, Kant substantiates the apodictic nature and lack of alternative to the ontology of nature by turning nature into a correlate of consciousness and strictly limiting the principles of mathematical natural science to the boundaries of the phenomenal world. As a result, the true theme of philosophy—the thing in itself and transcendental subjectivity itself—is taken beyond the boundaries of ontology. The thematization of the naturalistic origins of transcendentalism and the removal of transcendental consciousness beyond the boundaries of ontology, carried out within its framework, thus reveals the problematic nature of these premises. The article also demonstrates that, despite significant differences in the understanding of transcendental philosophy and ontology between Kant and Husserl, the identified motives—the naturalistic nature of the ontological foundation and the meta-ontological character of transcendental subjectivity—remain of fundamental importance for the founder of phenomenology. This allows us to conclude that ontology is not the original domain of confrontation between transcendentalism and naturalism and to substantiate the compatibilist thesis according to which transcendentalism is compatible with ontological naturalism. (shrink)

I argue that current projects in ‘naturalized metaphysics’ fail to be properly naturalistic, and thereby fail in their stated aim to take one’s metaphysics from science. I argue that naturalism must involve the idea of taking science seriously, and that this can only be spelled out in terms of taking not only the theories of science seriously, but also its practice and its socio-linguistic situatedness seriously as well. This accords with naturalism because not doing so draws an artificial (non-natural) distinction (...) between the epistemic products of science as essence, and its socio-linguistic and practical features as accidents. The picture of naturalism which falls out of this is a form of pragmatism. Once this is spelled out, the question becomes, what is the appropriate attitude for the pragmatist/naturalist to have toward ontology? It is not the same as that of traditional metaphysics, since such an attitude (that metaphysical theorizing can make positive epistemic contributions) requires a priori commitments which themselves are (1) not subject to empirical review, and (2) are anthropocentric and so potentially distorted. But the pragmatist/naturalist will not go the opposite way, and say that metaphysics is meaningless either, since (true to their pragmatic commitments) ontology does things for the scientist and the layperson. It is a mistake to reject it wholesale, since the task of asserting what there is, exposing such an ontology to criticism, both empirical and logical, and revising it, has both small-scale and large-scale consequences. On the small-scale, ontologies are a guide for thinking—scientists, engineers, and lay people can and do use models of existence to navigate occurent problems in their day-to-day lives. Whether this is posing research hypotheses, developing protocols for generating new materials, or cooling off a cup of coffee, ontology plays a role. Large-scale consequences are more weighty, and more difficult to see. These large-scale consequences have to do with the aims and values which individuals and societies possess, and their interrelation with ontology. This certainly was at the forefront of the earliest ontologies—the Epicureans and Stoics built their moral philosophy on the basis of what ontology they thought was correct. This sort of practice goes on, unabated, today, though with virtually no overt acknowledgement of this important interdependency. How, for the pragmatist, do we make sense of ontological talk, if we are to eschew traditional metaphysics? Ontology—the naturalist/pragmatist declares—is a tool. Ontology helps us do things, whether it be predict behavior, understand phenomena, blame or forgive someone, and hope or despair about a life after this one (for example). Building an ontology is about building our own concepts, and this, in turn is a negotiation between our beliefs, experiences, and commitments, and the beliefs, experiences, and commitments of with whom we’re discursively engaged. (shrink)