User:Brews ohare/Ontology

Ontology and language
Some philosophers suggest that the question of "What is?" is (at least in part) an issue of usage rather than a question about facts. This perspective is conveyed by an analogy made by Donald Davidson: Suppose a person refers to a 'cup' as a 'chair' and makes some comments pertinent to a cup, but uses the word 'chair' consistently throughout instead of 'cup'. One might readily catch on that this person simply calls a 'cup' a 'chair' and the oddity is explained. Analogously, if we find people asserting 'there are' such-and-such, and we do not ourselves think that 'such-and-such' exist, we might conclude that these people are not nuts (Davidson calls this assumption 'charity'), they simply use 'there are' differently than we do. The question of What is? is at least partially a topic in the philosophy of language, and is not entirely about ontology itself. This viewpoint has been expressed by Eli Hirsch. Hirsch interprets Hilary Putnam as asserting that different concepts of "the existence of something" can be correct. This position does not contradict the view that some things do exist, but points out that different 'languages' will have different rules about assigning this property. How to determine the 'fitness' of a 'language' to the world then becomes a subject for investigation.

A broader relation of ontology to language exists than only the usage of the phrase "What is?". In simple terms, it is suggested that a language contains terms and propositions that are thought by those that use that language to refer to 'real' things, things 'that are'. Different views about this connection exist. One view is that science determines "what is" and the philosopher's job is to keep straight the language describing what the scientist has found. Others take the view that examination of language can determine what things the language is about: its ontological commitment. A third view, is that ontology is about linguistic reference, which is not a matter of usage within a language but of how language relates to the world.

The complications of determining just what a language refers to were explained by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein held that to understand words one must look at the context of their use in ordinary language (compare with contextualism). In Philosophical Investigations §65-§77, Wittgenstein examines the meaning of words like 'game' and 'color' and shows their meaning is an amalgam of overlapping contexts that cannot be distilled to a single over-arching meaning. He indicates that for special purposes one can circumscribe the meaning of a word, draw a boundary, but apart form such special applications, the concept is recognized with a generality that transcends any such attempt to circumscribe it. ""If someone were to draw a sharp boundary I could not acknowledge it as the one that I too always wanted to draw, or had drawn in my mind. For I did not want to draw one at all. His concept can then be said to be not the same as mine, but akin to it. ...The kinship is just as undeniable as the difference.""

- Ludwig Wittgenstein

Evidently, should we try to infer what 'exists' from the meaning of a word, no unique answer can be expected.

Wittgenstein's work was the spark that formed the school of ordinary language philosophy, but its proponents are not necessarily close followers of Wittgenstein's teachings. "So-called 'Ordinary Language Philosophy' which flourished at Oxford mainly during the 1950's...is sometimes thought to be a result of Wittgenstein's teachings, but in fact his influence was far less immediate than that...There is no doubt that Wittgenstein's views had some part in promoting the philosophical concern of language...; but it is equally certain that Wittgenstein would have found parts of 'Ordinary Language Philosophy' uncongenial."

- A.C. Grayling

Despite this disclaimer, modern discussions of ordinary language philosophy show much in parallel with the above views of Wittgenstein. According to Parker-Ryan, a controversy exists between parties that think philosophy is about inquiring into 'facts' ("the general structure and fundamental ontology of reality") and those that think it is about 'meanings' of expressions used to describe them, a controversy "that will probably go on indefinitely".

Digression
The 'big picture' here that would take several months to put together and properly source, and which would involve many WP articles is this: (i) language is essential to thought; (ii) language is partly programmed into our brains by evolution; (iii) language is about communication; (iv) what we can talk about is partly limited by our mental organization around language and by the community zeitgeist.

The standard view of scientists is that of Carnap: some possibly mathematical theory connected by experiments to the real world. The contribution of Quine and Wittgenstein and Kuhn is that this is very simplistic: it ignores the fact that 'experiments' cannot be done without a huge assortment of ancillary equipment and training that cannot be divorced from the 'meaning' of the theory and is not part of the theory at all, but a community practice. What we mean by a 'quark' is very complicated, and involves things like Hadron colliders and teams of technicians and fund-raising PR experts as well as the Standard Model.

I think it is obvious that for an ontology that includes quarks, there is a lot going on here.

Probably this picture is hard to put together in the WP articles, but parts of it can be assembled.