Construct · 3 fields · 7 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
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The branch of metaphysics that studies what exists and what it is to be: what kinds of things there are, and what it means for something to exist at all. The Latin word ontologia was first printed by Jacob Lorhard in 1606 (Ogdoas Scholastica) and independently by Rudolph Goclenius in 1613, and Christian Wolff made it a systematic discipline in his 1730 Philosophia prima sive Ontologia. Quine's 1948 On What There Is recast the question as one of ontological commitment: which entities a theory must assume to exist for its claims to be true. Here ontology is a mode of inquiry into being itself, not a file that lists concepts for a computer, and not the world of beings a particular culture takes for granted.[1][2][3]
A particular people's understanding of what kinds of beings inhabit the world and how they relate: not a universal theory of being but the assumptions about existence carried within a specific culture. Hallowell's 1960 Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View used the word this way, describing how the Ojibwa treat certain non-human entities as living, willful persons. Viveiros de Castro's 1998 Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism extended the idea, arguing that different peoples inhabit genuinely different worlds rather than holding different views of one shared world, a move later called the ontological turn. Here an ontology is plural and cultural, a lived world of beings, unlike the single discipline of the philosophers or the engineered file of the computer scientists.[4][5]
A formal, machine-readable artifact that names the concepts in a domain, the relations among them, and rules constraining them, so that separate programs can share a common vocabulary. Gruber's 1993 A translation approach to portable ontology specifications gave the working definition, an explicit specification of a conceptualization, and his 1995 Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing set out design criteria for building them. Here an ontology is something you construct and store, such as the Gene Ontology or a Semantic Web schema, rather than the philosopher's study of being or a culture's assumptions about what exists.[6][7]
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