Welcome back to The Philosopher’s Lexicon. My primary goal in this series is to explore common philosophical vocabulary, hopefully transforming these words from useless jargon into meaningful terms. My secondary goal is to highlight how contentious some of these terms can be – especially those which seem obvious. These definitions will not be comprehensive by any means, so please feel free to add your own understanding of each term as we go.
One of the words for this week is “ontology”. Inspired by the post “Down With Reality” from the blog Blogging Is a Responsibility, I realized that no philosopher’s lexicon can be complete without this word. However, taken on its own, “ontology” is a tricky business, and so I will be pairing it with another philosophical concept: epistemology. Taken together, these terms are far easier to understand than they are in isolation.
Ontology is, technically speaking, the study of being itself. What does it mean for something to exist? What does it mean for something to be “real”? You will often hear this term within the context of a debate over the “ontological status” of some proposed entity. What makes this a murky question is that the answer often comes in terms of degrees or sub-definitions.
For example, when a philosopher raises questions about the ontological status of counting numbers, the question isn’t just asking whether or not counting numbers are real, but in what way they can be said to be real. Are they symbols which signify some conceptual reality that exists independently of themselves? Or is the concept of “number” bound up within the symbol itself? Are numbers actual objects of knowledge, or merely tools which aid our human knowledge, and not themselves objects of that knowledge?
Epistemology is often posited as an alternative to ontology, as we see in the example above. Epistemology, strictly speaking, is the study of knowledge, and it too can often be found in the form of an adjective, treading in the murky waters of degree and sub-definition. When we ask about the epistemological status of numbers, we are primarily attempting to classify in what ways numbers can be known, and in what ways they aid in giving us knowledge of true things outside of our minds.
To put it simply, ontology is about the nature of existence, and epistemology is about the way we know and understand things which can be said or thought to exist. These terms become most confusing when we mix them together, either intentionally or unintentionally.
One example of an intentional collapse of the terms comes to us from Plato’s Republic. In the Republic, Socrates argues that all things which are ontologically real must be epistemologically knowable to a parallel degree, and then takes the converse to be equally true. Individual physical things are only knowable to individual people who have encountered those physical objects during their short lives, and are thus only real in a very limited way. However the idea behind a given physical object – its category, or the mathematical concepts that compose it – can be known with or without physical engagement with any particular object, and are thus real in a way that physical objects never can be. For instance, you may see many different individual chairs come and go, but the idea of the chair exists in your mind and in your knowledge regardless. Beyond that, your knowledge of the shapes made by those chairs can exist with or without any experience with any particular physical object at all. And beyond that, the pure ideas of “order” and “goodness” are independently knowable to anyone in any time, and are thus the most real of all. The union of the ontological and the epistemological here is the foundation of what people think of as Plato’s “theory of forms”, requiring an assumption of metaphysical ontology. Taken more empirically, such a union can lead to Berkley’s idealism, requiring an omniscient figure to explain away the threat of ontological solipsism.
While the intentional collapse of ontology and epistemology is plenty objectionable to many philosophers and thinkers who would see these two qualifiers as explicitly separate, I think that the unintentional collapse of the two terms is far more dangerous. I think, however, that I’ve covered this as thoroughly as I am currently able in my posts on teaching, language, and the de dicto/de re distinction. However, keeping these two categories completely separate is not just itself a difficult task, but it raises a whole new set of difficulties about whether – and how – we can ever encounter and understand reality just as it is, or if we’ll only ever be able to develop our own mediated version of it.
In other words, we might just be finding our way into an epistemological solipsism instead. And if the ontological and epistemological are truly separate, is there any way to know if we’ve ever known something real?
14 thoughts on “The Philosopher’s Lexicon: Ontology and Epistemology”
whitefrozen
I think you’ve hit on why the representational theory of mind (or the way of ideas) has come under so much fire, from Reid to Sellars to Rorty.
M. Joelle
I’d love, as always, to see your examples expanded, if you’ve the time and inclination! Particularly your thoughts on Sellars.
whitefrozen
I think a rough line can be traced from Reid, with his attack on the Way of Ideas, through Sellars, with his Myth of the Given, to Rorty, with his eliminativism (Hegel probably belongs in there as well, since his ‘rational as the real’ is taken directly from Plato). Each takes as the starting point the thesis that there is a content of experience which is ‘given’, upon which we can build our epistemic (or noetic) structures. From Hume to Berkely to Russell to Carnap (who essentially have identical ideas, though under different names) we have essentially this project – foundationalist empiricism. The great problem, which you hint at in your closing, is that, in one way or another, the skeptical problems will fall out on this view – usually in the form of ‘how do we know that X is real’, or ‘How am I justified in taking X to be the case’. I’m not so sure that representaional theories of thought are as weak as some would have it on this basis, but as far as foundationalism, well, that’s about dead. I suspect a good deal can be gleaned from Davidson here:
“The trouble we have been running into is that the justification seems to depend on the awareness, which is just another belief… The relation between a sensation and a belief cannot be logical, since sensations are not beliefs or other propositional attitudes” (Donald Davidson, “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” in Dieter Henrich, ed., Kant or Hegel?)
Part of the problem as I see it has to do with making epistemology our first philosophy, which is what I take empiricism thus conceived to be doing. This was (one of) Berkely’s mistakes – there is a clear and unjustified leap from ‘All I experience is X’ to ‘X is all that exists’ (the other mistake being, as Haldane has noted, that while conceiving of something that cannot be conceived of is indeed incoherent, there is nothing particularly difficult in conceiving of something existing as unconceived. Thus his other great argument really falls weak at the knees with this kept in mind).
Regarding Sellars in particular, I’ll refrain from pronouncing too much on him since I’ve yet to read more than some of his essays and no full works, but I think that his attacks on empiricism are spot on, though I’m less confident in his attacks on philosophies of mind based on privileged access to qualia etc. If you simply google ‘Wilfrid Sellars’ you can find two great essays (if you’ve not read them already) on his manifest/scientific image and Aristotelian philosophy of mind, which I’m reading now. Having dipped into Sellars, I’ve found myself much more interested in the Pittsburg school – especially his student Robert Brandom (and I make no claim to have more than an elementary grasp of his thought at the moment).
Your point about whether we ever come into contact with reality itself or only through mediations of it is a key question as well.If we follow the empiricists (and are consistent in doing so) then I don’t much see how we can avoid ending up with Hegel and the rational as the real, where our thought constitutes reality.
M. Joelle
Thank you so much for this excellent summary. While I disagree a bit that Russell falls into that same category as Hume and Berkley and Carnap, I take your identification of the bigger problem (that we now seem to take epistemology as our first philosophy) quite well. I think that solving the dilemma in your last paragraph is going to require seeing our epistemological perspectives as more aligned with our imagination, while simultaneously developing a much higher regard for that capacity. I’m still working on that last concept, but I think that changing /how/ we value epistemology is going to be important.
whitefrozen
I’ll recommend again James KA Smiths book ‘Imagining the Kingdom’ which for all its shortfalls does a superb job of fleshing out the aesthetic and imaginative aspect of ‘epistemology’ (a term he doesn’t himself use). The key is to accept the role that emotion plays in our perception of the world (in a Merlau-Ponty way) as well as the role of things like metaphor and analogy in the structure of our experience and how we construe the world (and even constitute the world) at a very deep level, while not downplaying the role of formal epistemology.
bloggingisaresponsibility
Thanks for the plug! Great article — I love how you tied multiple strands of thought. I like what you said about the epistemology/ontology distinction. Epistemology is defined in relation to an ontology, and epistemology is how an ontology comes into our consciousness. So Berkeley’s project was to eliminate both (or the epistemological dilemma) by eliminating ontology (given that we only have access to epistemology).
M. Joelle
Thank you for the nice comments! I definitely used your post as a starting point, and as motivation to explore the tensions with epistemology. And I think you can interpret Berkley in two ways – either we only have ontology, or we only have epistemology, but only God has both. I might be wrong in that interpretation, though.
James Pailly
Next time I can’t remember which term is which, I’m checking here.
M. Joelle
I use your Sciency Words series in the same way!
SelfAwarePatterns
“I think that the unintentional collapse of the two terms is far more dangerous.”
Hear, hear! One of the first questions I often ask when reading a philosophical proposition is whether it’s an ontological (what is) or epistemological (what we can know) one, if it’s not already stated.
M. Joelle
Agreed! It’s difficult sometimes, but so necessary.
PeterJ
“And if the ontological and epistemological are truly separate, is there any way to know if we’ve ever known something real?”
Excellent question!
It’s a big ‘IF’. In my view the problem does not arise because they are not separate. Cf. Aristotle – ‘True knowledge is identical with its object’.
M. Joelle
When in doubt, return to the Greeks!
PeterJ
Yep. I find that statement one of the most important in all philosophy, and the exact solution for the ontology/epistemology division. So we might as well go all the way back to ‘Know Thyself’ and the Divine Mysteries.