Ontological Choices Research Articles

Rainbow Serpents and Boiling Springs: Indigenous Sovereignty and the Fight for Groundwater in the United States and Australia

Around the world, Indigenous people are preparing for futures of climate uncertainty and resource shortages. Indigenous communities are looking to the past and seeking guidance from their traditions – diverse systems of knowledge that change over time – so that they and future generations might nurture connections to the “deep time” of geological and human histories. In this essay we examine how the Wangan and Jagalingou Family Council in Australia and the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians in the United States have taken long-term views on ecological sustainability and sovereignty. We focus on these two Indigenous communities on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean because they are among the highest-profile battles over ancient groundwater in the past decade. Set against a backdrop of global settler state interference and exploitative economic practices, both cases reveal how the concept of kinscapes – or a shared sense of relatedness to interconnected ecosystems, histories, and places (or nodes) of belonging – can sharpen our understanding of environmental stewardship and its importance to Indigenous sovereignty. Whereas mining corporations and settler governments continue to make decisions with short- to medium-term objectives in mind, Wangan and Jagalingou and Agua Caliente leaders have used legal battles over groundwater to underscore their spiritual and physical connectedness with local environments. Like Indigenous communities around the world, the Wangan and Jagalingou Family Council and the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians are making ontological choices by asserting their sovereignty through environmental stewardship.

Ongoing attempts towards decolonising a British D.Clin.Psy. research space

In this article, a summary is provided of certain actions towards decolonising the research space within a British D.Clin.Psy. programme, and some of the thinking that informed these actions. The importance of decolonisation in universities, and in clinical psychology – despite the ‘challenges’ that it seems to pose to some - is discussed. Genuine efforts towards decolonisation are rendered distinct from more general equality, diversity and inclusion activities - unlike ‘diversification’, decolonisation demands systemic changes in spaces, such that colonising / recolonising functions cease to operate. It is noted that some British D.Clin.Psy. programmes have made concrete steps towards decolonisation; and in complementing such initiatives, and also in drawing inspiration from experiences and perspectives from elsewhere in the world, some actions towards decolonisation in Plymouth University’s D.Clin. Psy. programme’s research space have been initiated. These have included recognising, challenging and providing alternatives to the Western and Eurocentric models that have dominated how we have traditionally thought and taught about, and conducted research in, clinical psychology; communicating the importance of recognising the adoption of the Western ‘scientific method’ as a deliberate epistemological and ontological choice; and, actively supporting the undertaking of social justice and community-orientated research by D.Clin.Psy. trainees. In the interests of collaboration and mutual support, a suggestion is made to establish a nationwide network devoted to the meaningful decolonisation of clinical psychology in the UK.

Putting an End to “Man”: Nature and the Human in Hegel, Becoming-Animal and Abolitionism

The article attempts to reconstruct the difference between the ontologies of Hegel and Deleuze. The question of nature and Man (as different from the human animal) in both philosophies can provide crucial insight into the fundamental ontological disparity between the two philosophies. Nature, according to Hegel, is truly external to the idea and (as such) is at the same time a moment in the movement of the concept becoming what it is. Deleuze, in contrast, goes back to pre-Kantian ontology without abandoning the transcendental level of analysis. This enables him to bestow upon nature real externality and to transform the dialectic into a mechanism of opening to the inexhaustible outside, not of confirming the primacy of the concept. The case of becoming-animal demonstrates the political implications of this ontological choice: it can be understood as a way of putting an end to “Man,” an enterprise compatible with abolitionist postulates.

Time reversal invariance and ontology

Albert and Callender have challenged the received view that theories like classical electrodynamics and non-relativistic quantum mechanics are time-reversal invariant. According to their view of time-reversal invariance, these theories are not time-reversal invariant. If so, then the important metaphysical implication is that space-time must have a temporal orientation. There is a large debate on what is the best way of viewing time-reversal invariance, with many philosophers defending the standard notion contra Albert and Callender. In this paper, we will not be concerned so much with that aspect of the debate, but rather focus our attention on an aspect of the Albert and Callender view that has received little attention, namely the role of ontology. In the type of theories that are considered the ontology is actually underdetermined. We will argue that with a suitable choice of ontology, these theories are in fact time-reversal invariant according their view.

DOLCE: A descriptive ontology for linguistic and cognitive engineering1

dolce, the first top-level (foundational) ontology to be axiomatized, has remained stable for twenty years and today is broadly used in a variety of domains. dolce is inspired by cognitive and linguistic considerations and aims to model a commonsense view of reality, like the one human beings exploit in everyday life in areas as diverse as socio-technical systems, manufacturing, financial transactions and cultural heritage. dolce clearly lists the ontological choices it is based upon, relies on philosophical principles, is richly formalized, and is built according to well-established ontological methodologies, e.g. OntoClean. Because of these features, it has inspired most of the existing top-level ontologies and has been used to develop or improve standards and public domain resources (e.g. CIDOC CRM, DBpedia and WordNet). Being a foundational ontology, dolce is not directly concerned with domain knowledge. Its purpose is to provide the general categories and relations needed to give a coherent view of reality, to integrate domain knowledge, and to mediate across domains. In these 20 years dolce has shown that applied ontologies can be stable and that interoperability across reference and domain ontologies is a reality. This paper briefly introduces the ontology and shows how to use it on a few modeling cases.

The Ontological Choice of the Philosopher

The text reveals the approaches of the philosopher as a thinker to be in the being. Two possible paradigms for achieving the absolute as a form of philosophizing are presented. One is related to the school-academic historicalphilosophical approach, and the other is related to metaphysical experience as an act. The thesis is asserted that the metaphysical goal is achievable only as an individual practical experience of transcendence through the action of the thinker conceived as a precedent. The understanding is argued that it is in the metaphysical act that the thinker objectifies philosophical wisdom, not just the love of philosophy.

Logical Identity: A Holistic Approach

It is my intention in this article to present some consequences of Quine’s thesis on the dependence of ontology on ideology (Quine, 1980), seeking an argument for my own thesis on the dependence (theoretical) existence of entities on identity type or ontology dependence on logic and language.If Quine's thesis is correct, then we can expand the resolution of this conclusion and say that ontology depends on the identity or on identification of the "identity criteria for conceptual schemes" (Davidson, 2001) which is constructed in the theory. Consequently I will speak about types of identity which adapts choice of ontology and of which depends ontology of a theory. Here I want to connect the different types of use of the term identity in Aristotle's writings and the different types of predications that are based on them with the concept of identity as the equivalence of symbols in modern logic. I want to reinterpret Quine's statement: "There is no entity without identity " in the form of imlication "What (kind of) identity such (kind of ) entity."

Korean travel selfies as contested placemaking practices

Selfies allow us to exert control over how we are seen and to construct our identity through the people, places, and activities that we imbue with value. The composition of the image, situation, and location photographed indicate aesthetic and ontological choices that reveal cultural values, performances of identity and social position of the person taking the selfie. When read as digital placemaking practices, travel selfies become salient to producers and audiences as political and performative expressions of identity and one’s place in the world. This article examines the travel selfie within the South Korean context and argues that thinking about selfies as placemaking practices informs the productive and potentially empowering nature of these photographs, which simultaneously conform to and contest neoliberal consumerist ideologies. The authors analyze a case study in which the placemaking practices of selfies are represented and critiqued. We argue that these digital placemaking practices become sites where young people’s imaginations, aspirations, and frustrations about social hierarchies, national imaginaries, and class status are expressed and debated through representations of international travel. Through textual and discourse analysis of the images and virulent public criticism faced by South Korean females who travel abroad and document their experiences on Instagram and Naver, we examine the tensions that emerge regarding expressions of the ‘spatial self’ online.

Responsibility as an Ethical Value

The individual thinking of each of us causes many of us to give up the utopian dreams of the human mastery over living conditions and the exercise of a new responsibility, in accordance with our new powers. Our ethical responsibility and our fateful ontological choice is to do what is necessary to ensure the continued, worldly integrity of mankind and it's continuity in an indefinite future, to ensure a good continuation of life between communities or even in the relations between the states of the world. We point out as a first example the ecological crisis and the moral crisis of transforming ecological behavior into a habit when humanity needs resources to survive. However, it is necessary to give recognition to researchers who claim that traditional systems of ethics do not have the resources to cope with our unprecedented technological powers, and the effort of all to fill the philosophical void but also the real, tangible and practically proven part of ethics with an "ethics of responsibility", it is something other than a simple daily habit.

Data system design alters meaning in ecological data: salmon habitat restoration across the U.S. Pacific Northwest

AbstractAs an increasing variety and complexity of environmental issues confront scientists and natural resource managers, assembling the most relevant and informative data into accessible data systems becomes critical to timely problem solving. Data interoperability is the key criterion for succeeding in that assembly, and much informatics research is focused on data federation, or synthesis to produce interoperable data. However, when candidate data come from numerous, diverse, and high‐value legacy data sources, the issue of data variety or heterogeneity can be a significant impediment to interoperability. Research in informatics, computer science and philosophy has frequently focused on resolving data heterogeneity with automation, but subject matter expertise still plays a large role. In particular, human expertise is a large component in the development of tools such as data dictionaries, crosswalks, and ontologies. Such representations may not always match from one data system to another, presenting potentially inconsistent results even with the same data. Here, we use a long‐term data set on management actions designed to improve stream habitat for endangered salmon in the Pacific Northwest, to illustrate how different representations can change the underlying information content in the data system. We pass the same data set comprised of 49,619 records through three ontologies, each developed to address a rational management need, and show that the inferences drawn from the data can change with choice of data representation or ontology. One striking example shows that the use of one ontology would suggest water quality improvement projects are the rarest and most expensive restoration actions undertaken, while another will suggest these actions to be the most common and least expensive type of management actions. The discrepancy relates to the origins of the data dictionaries themselves, with one designed to catalog management actions and the other focused on ecological processes. Thus, we argue that in data federation efforts humans are “in the loop” rationally, in the form of the ontologies they have chosen, and diminishing the human component in favor of automation carries risks. Consequently, data federation exercises should be accompanied by validations in order to evaluate and manage those risks.

Identifying and Measuring Capabilities for Career Development in NEET Young People

Amartya Sen's Capability Approach offers great potential as a conceptual fra­mework for promoting social justice and well-being through economic and edu­cational engagement. Yet the capability approach presents researchers with for­midable difficulties, not least because it is intentionally left incomplete, and little guidance is available on its application. It is therefore necessary to make choices in order to apply the approach to a specific context. This paper will introduce the issue of social justice in a career development context, and metho­dological challenges in researching capabilities. It will attempt to provide a rationale for methodological choices in four stages. Firstly, the choice of epistemology and ontology ; secondly, choices of level of analysis and disciplinary perspective ; thirdly, the choice of research methods. An example of career development with disadvantaged NEET young people (not in employment, education or training) in the United Kingdom will be considered.

Fit for purpose? Fitting ontological security studies ‘into’ the discipline of International Relations: Towards a vernacular turn

The performance of International Relations (IR) scholarship – as in all scholarship – acts to close and police the boundaries of the discipline in ways that reflect power–knowledge relations. This has led to the development of two strands of work in ontological security studies in IR, which divide on questions of ontological choice and the nature of the deployment of the concept of dread. Neither strand is intellectually superior to the other and both are internally heterogeneous. That there are two strands, however, is the product of the performance of IR scholarship, and the two strands themselves perform distinct roles. One allows ontological security studies to engage with the ‘mainstream’ in IR; the other allows ‘international’ elements of ontological security to engage with the social sciences more generally. Ironically, both can be read as symptoms of the discipline’s issues with its own ontological (in)security. We reflect on these intellectual dynamics and their implications and prompt a new departure by connecting ontological security studies in IR with the emerging interdisciplinary fields of the ‘vernacular’ and ‘everyday’ via the mutual interest in biographical narratives of the self and the work that they do politically.

Ontological Choices and the Value-Free Ideal

The aim of this article is to argue that ontological choices in scientific practice undermine common formulations of the value-free ideal in science. First, I argue that the truth values of scientific statements depend on ontological choices. For example, statements about entities such as species, race, memory, intelligence, depression, or obesity are true or false relative to the choice of a biological, psychological, or medical ontology. Second, I show that ontological choices often depend on non-epistemic values. On the basis of these premises, I argue that it is often neither possible nor desirable to evaluate scientific statements independently of non-epistemic values. Finally, I suggest that considerations of ontological choices do not only challenge the value-free ideal but also help to specify positive roles of non-epistemic values in an often neglected area of scientific practice.

Doing Ontology and Doing Justice: What Feminist Philosophy Can Teach Us About Meta-Metaphysics

Feminist philosophy has recently become recognised as a self-standing philosophical sub-discipline. Still, metaphysics has remained largely dismissive of feminist insights. Here I make the case for the value of feminist insights in metaphysics: taking them seriously makes a difference to our ontological theory choice and feminist philosophy can provide helpful methodological tools to regiment ontological theories. My examination goes as follows. Contemporary ontology is not done via conceptual analysis, but via quasi-scientific means. This takes different ontological positions to be competing hypotheses about reality’s fundamental structure that are then assessed with a loose battery of criteria for theory choice. Such criteria make up the constitutive values of ontology (e.g. providing a unified, coherent, non-circular, simple, parsimonious total theory). These values are distinguished from contextual values of a practice: the political and moral values embedded in the social context of inquiry. Although we may be frank about some meta-metaphysical value commitments, bringing in feminist contextual values is viewed as an unacceptable move when thinking about ontological theory choice. This paper then asks: is this move unacceptable? I think not and I aim to motivate this methodological insight here by examining recent work on grounding.

Between a subject and an object: representation of China in Kuo Pao-kun’s Singapore and Denny Yung’s Hong Kong

Late Pao-kun Kuo in Singapore and contemporary Denny Yung in Hong Kong have made particular ontological and epistemological choices in their experimental theater in the context of the de-colonization and rise of China. We gather, between the two sites, a possible dichotomy in the representation of China: China as a collective subject to accommodate the changing world and China as an individualized object that emerges in each narrator’s chosen perspective. Kuo intends to prompt the audience to reconnect with something greater than their individuality. For Kuo, the crisis is the loss of cultural subjectivity and the privileging of transcendence over individualized meanings of life. For Yung, cultural subjectivity is no longer a question after the return of Hong Kong to China. Yung painstakingly generates the legitimacy and capacity of individual Hong Kong people to have faith in their own ways of transcending any version of the entirety of China.

Heidegger, Education and the ‘Cult of the Authentic’

Within educational philosophies that utilise the Heideggerian idea of ‘authenticity’ there can be distinguished at least two readings that correspond with the categories of ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ utopianism. ‘Strong-utopianism’ is the nostalgia for some lost Edenic paradise to be restored at some future time. Here it is the ‘world’ that needs to be transcended for it is the source of our inauthenticity, where we are the puppets of modernist-capitalist ideologies. ‘Authenticity’ here is a value-judgment, understood as something that makes you a better person. The ‘inauthentic’ person is simply deceived. ‘Weak-utopianism’ is recognising the forces for change in the ‘everyday-immanent’ where we do not look to overcome the world but own it as ‘heritage’. ‘Authenticity’ here is an ontological choice, a modification of inauthenticity, not its opposite. The ‘cult of the authentic’ relates to the ‘strong utopianism’ where ‘authenticity’ has become fetishized, harking back to a purer, pre-modern state, untainted by the ideals of the Enlightenment and ethos of capitalism. ‘Authentic education’ is the overcoming of our environments and socio-historical contexts, opening up new horizons of meaning. The radical notion of freedom that this implies, where one is free from rather than free in the realisation of constraint, may also be another dividing line between the ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ readings, which lend themselves to a Messianic narrative. It will be argued that if ‘authentic education’ is understood through a ‘strong utopianism’ it actually re-enforces those very same dystopian ideals they look to overcome as characterised by ‘enframing’.

Não-individualidade em mecânica quântica

The non-relativistic quantum mechanics offers us conditions to consider at least two possible metaphysical packages, but incompatible between themselves: metaphysics of individuals, and metaphysics of non-individuals. In addition, the standard formalism is compatible with both the ontologies, without the theory being decided for either of them. From this particular kind of situation, the thesis of the underdetermination of metaphysics by physics can be established. Actually, it can be found, among scientists and philosophers, defenders of one, or another ontology, as well as those who do not address the issue, given that theory on its own does not decide. This means that if we make a choice for one of these packages, it will be happing in a metaphysical field, increasing a lot the philosophical discussions about individuality of quantic objects in quantum physics. From a naturalized methodological view, we present the issues from those defend the individuality of quantic objects, and from those, include us, defend non-individuality, focusing two approaches: (i) the ontological one, in which the fail of IIP as individuation principle is discussed; and, (ii) the logical one, in which non-reflexive logics, as well as a quasi-set theory became more suitable for representing the non-individuals. In this paper we stand for the choice of non-individuals ontology becomes more plausible, and should be taken in account seriously, opening up possibilities for ontological pluralism.

Security Ontology for Adaptive Mapping of Security Standards

Adoption of security standards has the capability of improving the security level in an organization as well as to provide additional benefits and possibilities to the organization. However mapping of used standards has to be done when more than one security standard is employed in order to prevent redundant activities, not optimal resource management and unnecessary outlays. Employment of security ontology to map different standards can reduce the mapping complexity however the choice of security ontology is of high importance and there are no analyses on security ontology suitability for adaptive standards mapping. In this paper we analyze existing security ontologies by comparing their general properties, OntoMetric factors and ability to cover different security standards. As none of the analysed security ontologies were able to cover more than 1/3 of security standards, we proposed a new security ontology, which increased coverage of security standards compared to the existing ontologies and has a better branching and depth properties for ontology visualization purposes. During this research we mapped 4 security standards (ISO 27001, PCI DSS, ISSA 5173 and NISTIR 7621) to the new security ontology, therefore this ontology and mapping data can be used for adaptive mapping of any set of these security standards to optimize usage of multiple securitystandards in an organization.

Theoretical developments in industrial marketing management: Multidisciplinary perspectives

Marketing as a discipline in general, and industrial marketing in particular, has drawn upon a number of different theoretical perspectives from domains as diverse as organisational theory, systems analysis, economics, psychology, sociology and anthropology to further our understanding. However, to build this understanding and increase the relevance of marketing research, we need to be aware of the ontological assumptions and stances that such theoretical perspectives use. The purpose of this special issue is therefore to offer a platform for the exploration, comparison, application, and consideration of ontological choice and its implications in industrial marketing research. To achieve this we review early industrial marketing scholarship in this first section. In the second section, we identify the larger ebbs and flows that mark the development and advancement of industrial marketing research. In the final section, we provide an overview of the papers in this special issue in the form of a thematic exploration of theoretical developments in industrial marketing management research.

Complementation in Representable Theories of Region-Based Space

Through contact algebras we study theories of mereotopology in a uniform way that clearly separates mereological from topological concepts. We identify and axiomatize an important subclass of closure mereotopologies (CMT) called unique closure mereotopologies (UCMTs) whose models always have orthocomplemented contact algebras (OCAs), an algebraic counterpart. The notion of MT-representability, a weak form of spatial representability but stronger than topological representability, suffices to prove that spatially representable complete OCAs are pseudocomplemented and satisfy the Stone identity. Within the resulting class of contact algebras the strength of the algebraic complementation delineates two classes of mereotopology according to the key ontological choice between mereological and topological closure operations. All closure operations are defined mereologically if and only if the corresponding contact algebras are uniquely complemented while topological closure operations highly restrict the contact relation but allow not uniquely complemented and nondistributive contact algebras. Each class contains a single ontologically coherent theory that admits discrete models.