User:Brews ohare/Ontological pluralism

Ontological pluralism is a term used in philosophy, science, and virtually any field of study to refer to different forms of existence found in these various fields. "There are various non-reducible levels of existence, for example, the physical, the biological, the psychological, the social, and the spiritual." A modern interpretation of ontological pluralism is that it discusses different ways, kinds, or modes of being. "There are numbers, fictional characters, impossible things, and holes. But, we don’t think these things all exist in the same sense as cars and human beings." "In contemporary guise, it is the doctrine that a logically perspicuous description of reality will use multiple quantifiers which cannot be thought of as ranging over a single domain."

Ontological pluralism is to be distinguished from other forms of pluralism, such as moral, logical, religious, cultural, and, in particular, epistemological pluralism, the study of different ways of knowing things, different epistemological methodologies for attaining a full description of a particular field.

It is common to refer to a film, novel or otherwise fictitious or virtual narrative as not being 'real'. For example, we might say that the characters in the film or novel are not real, where the 'real world' is the everyday world in which we live. However, as authors are wont to say, fiction informs our concept of reality, and so has some kind of reality.

In an analogous vein, the theories of science posit certain entities as 'real' in their explanations of scientific observations. The 'reality' of these entities is closely tied to the theories that contain them, and the observations incorporated as substantiation of these theories, what Rudolf Carnap called 'linguistic frameworks'. These specialized languages were viewed by Ludwig Wittgenstein as particular examples of the much broader realm of ordinary language.

Outside links

 * Ontological Pluralism A category in Philosophical Papers maintained by Nurbay Irmak; PhilPapers also has categories for Moral, Logical, Religious, Environmental, and Cultural pluralism.
 * Price
 * Kutz, Mossakowski, Lucke
 * Emmeche
 * Edward Fullbrook
 * Edgar Andrade
 * Gilson Olegario da Silva