Reading in Barry Smith, there is a flood of ideas, an entire lifetime of sophisticated semantic philosophy that considers 100 issues I have found interesting, and which I have tried to address in the Synthetic Dimensionality and Closed Loop concepts.

A core theme revolves around the question "what is real", and he defines a method which he describes as "ontological realism", affirming that this idea is a method, and not a doctrine.

1.2. Types, instances and resemblance

Different forms of realism are distinguished by philosophers, of which the most important for our purposes here are:

Scientific realism =def. the doctrine according to which scientific theories are (broadly) true of reality.

Metaphysical realism =def. the doctrine according to which universals or types exist in reality.

Merrill (2010, p. 85), quite correctly, sees elements of both of the above in the etiology of our thinking on ontology development. He himself embraces what he calls an ‘anti-realist’ position which consists in the denial of metaphysical realism as defined above, and which we can accordingly define as follows:

Anti-realism =def. the doctrine according to which there are no universals or types in reality, but only individuals or particulars.

Two forms of anti-realism can then be distinguished:

Nominalism =def. a variety of anti-realism consisting in a doctrine to the effect that entities labeled by the same term – for example, this bonobo and that bonobo – have nothing in common but their name.

Conceptualism =def. a variety of anti-realism consisting in a doctrine to the effect that entities conceptualized in the same way have nothing in common but the fact that they are so conceptualized.

Disputes between the realist and anti-realist camps have raged for some thousands of years. Anti-realists object to the metaphysical realist position because they find appeals to entities such as universals or types unscientific. Metaphysical realists object to anti-realism (in either version) because they see it as involving its own tacit appeal to universals in reality (either in the realm of words and utterances, or in the realm of cognition).

Since 2002 we have been attempting to move beyond such disputes by developing a methodology, which we call ‘ontological realism’, that will capture what we believe to be a kernel of practical significance in these debates by addressing the question what it is to which the terms used in ontologies should be seen as referring. Because ontological realism is a methodology, and not a doctrine, it stands in no logical relation to any of the metaphysical doctrines specified above. Certainly it takes over the terminology of ‘types’, ‘universals’, ‘instantiation’ from the metaphysical realist literature; but it does not stand or fall according to whether universals or types do or do not exist in some metaphysical sense, and our goal will be to provide a specification of our methodology which will allow even anti-realists to recognize its benefits.

1.3. The methodology

The methodology can be summarized as follows. Ontologists, when building ontologies, should conceive the world as including entities of two sorts – called ‘particulars’ (or ‘instances’) and ‘types’ (or ‘universals’), respectively. Particulars, according to this doctrine, are the sorts of things that can be described on the basis of observations performed for example in the lab or clinic. Types or universals – we shall always use these terms synonymously in what follows – are to be understood as counterparts in reality of (some of) the general terms used in the formulation of scientific theories.

Particulars are concrete individual entities (entities that exist in space and time and that exist only once); types or universals are to be understood as repeatable. This means that, for each given type, we can in principle discover of indefinitely many particulars that they are its instances. (We shall return to address in more detail the relation between universals and repeatables below.)

The particulars in reality can be partitioned into groups on the basis of multiple similarity relations which obtain between them, and the process of recognizing such collections of similars is essential to all forms of cognition. Sometimes the process yields classifications, which is to say partitions of reality based on hierarchies organized in terms of greater and lesser generality.

Wed, Feb 17, 2021