Philosophy: ontology, part 0

Self-tutoring about ideas: the tutor mentions ontology.

Ontology is a word I met maybe a year back. It’s used by philosophers, religious scholars, and computer scientists, among others. In some circles it’s used all the time, yet seems rarely used in everyday talk.

I’m going to give my pragmatic definition for ontology. Whether it’s correct or proper, I’ll let the scholars decide. I’ve read it in numerous contexts and looked it up a few times. Moreover, my older son used it one day talking about the Bible. (That he came across the word ontology at age 18, while I didn’t encounter it until age 49, seems surprising.)

Ontology, as I understand, means everything that exists in this reference frame. The term is often used to acknowledge the absence of something in reference frame B that does exist in reference frame A. Comparing two worlds, you have two ontologies. If those worlds communicate, they discover that some elements in one don’t have a cohort in the other. Moreover, the world you enter will have different elements not present in the world you left.

An example of different ontologies might be baseball vs football (or almost any other sport). Baseball is peculiar in that the game doesn’t end because of time; rather, it ends after nine innings, if not tied. If tied, then more innings are played until the tie is broken.

The point is that baseball doesn’t acknowledge time: you can’t “run down the clock” like in many sports. Time isn’t part of baseball’s ontology, while it’s an important part of the ontologies of soccer, hockey, football, and many other sports.

Imagine having a sport in which time doesn’t even exist. It seems only the Americans could conceive such a wonderful idea:)