Ontology Down-to-Earth

Abstract

Hilary Putnam famously pronounced an obituary for Ontology with a capital 'O' (Putnam 2004, 84-85). Without trying to enumerate ways in which I do and do not agree with Putnam,1 I want to consider ontology (without a capital 'O') as a more pedestrian enterprise than Putnam's capital-'O' Ontology. Ontology, as I see it, just tells us what entities and properties there are in irreducible reality. As such, ontology yields a form of realism. The task of ontology, I believe, is to bring to light what is required for a doubtlessly partial, but nonredundant, account of reality.2By 'reality,' as we shall see, I do not mean some artificial domain buttressed by a priori constraints. I mean full-throttle reality that includes everything-all entities, properties, and kinds-required to make intelligible what we perceive and interact with and what survives our inquiries.3 The only appropriate constraint on ontology is that what it includes is genuinely real, where genuine reality is understood in terms of what cannot be reduced to more basic items and what cannot be eliminated without loss.Many contemporary philosophers, however, put further constraints on ontology. I shall consider three of these constraints, and argue that each constraint gratuitously circumscribes reality to fit some a priori conception.4 The three constraints that I shall consider are, first, that ontology is limited to what is mind-independent; second, that ontology includes only what is deducible from physics; and third, that ontology must be expressible in a regimented Tarskian language.Each of these constraints-meta-ontological add-ons, really-is tantamount to a closure principle on reality. Each constraint, I shall argue, severely truncates reality, by excising (a priori) some important part of reality, and hence hobbles our efforts to formulate an adequate ontology. So, an ontology that is governed by any of these three constraints is ipso facto inadequate. Or so I shall argue.After arguing against the three constraints, I shall briefly sketch out my own view, which I call (Baker 2007). Practical Realism has room for normative phenomena that are embedded both in everyday practices and in scientific practices. And, while respecting the deliverances of science, Practical Realism does not take a scientific account of reality to be exhaustive. I offer Practical Realism as a new realism that takes genuine reality to include everything required for an exhaustive description of what we perceive, interact with, and the things that survive our investigations.FIRST CONSTRAINT: MIND INDEPENDENCEThe first constraint, which is almost universally held, is that ontology deals only with mind-independent items. Something is mind-independent if it could exist or be exemplified in a world without minds. Roughly, mind-independence restricts genuine reality to what would exist if higher animals had never evolved.Ted Sider mentions robust realism as a view ubiquitous among analytic philosophers, according to which the world is the way it is independent of human conceptualization (Sider 2009, 387). But consider: Great swaths of reality are ontologically dependent on human conceptualization. Credit default swaps-and other financial practices-could not exist without human conceptualization. The view mentioned by Sider may be ubiquitous, but it is surely arbitrary: We conceptualizing persons do exist and make significant contributions to what there is.Ernest Sosa has said, What the metaphysical realist is committed to holding is that there is an in-itself reality independent of our minds and even of our existence (Sosa 1993, 609). Yes, I agree, there is an in-itself reality independent of our minds, but that reality is far from exhaustive of genuine reality. Indeed, taking mindindependence as a constraint on genuine reality arbitrarily strips reality of most of what is important today. (Just try to describe current events in mind-independent terms. …