Ontological Problems Research Articles

Midrash and sophism in the context of transformation scientific and educational traditions in the 21st century

The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st cen-tury is characterized by multiple crises in most aspects of human existence, among which the education crisis is one of the most noticeable. The usual logic of problematizing and seeking ways to overcome the education crisis is linked to changes in the nor-mative-legal and economic conditions of educational activities, and much less attention is paid to the ontological problems of education. In this regard, the first task of this study was to con-ceptually formulate a request regarding the resources and tools for overcoming the ontological crisis in education. In the context of studying the main stages and results of three decades of re-forms in the field of Russian education, three interconnected re-quests have been identified: 1) Individualization and differentia-tion of the content of education while maintaining basic value-semantic unity; 2) Ensuring the social and economic relevance of the content of education, ensuring its demand and feasibility; 3) Rooting the content of education in social and humanitarian tra-ditions that are capable of influencing and transforming modern social and humanitarian practices. The categories of “midrash” and “sophism” emerged at roughly the same time (around the 5th century BCE) and represent complex phenomena of oral cultures that developed in the Eastern Mediterranean: midrash in the con-text of the Jewish religious tradition, and sophism (as well as the syllogism that gave rise to it) in the ancient city-state tradition. Moreover, each of these phenomena fully corresponds to the re-quirements listed above. 1) Reconceptualization of the educa-tional attitude as a means of ensuring intergenerational connec-tion and continuity; 2) Inherent duality of cultural and education-al traditions in their relationship with “text” and “language” (to which modern culture adds “visible image”); 3) The need to modernize the system of educational standards based on dia-chronic traditions and synchronic cultural-anthropological mod-els; 4) Actualization of issues and tools for ensuring dialogue and "openness" of traditions, identifying their contextual meanings and requests addressed by current socio-humanitarian practices; 5) Integration of projects, socio-educational initiatives and prac-tices around identified scientific and educational traditions and cultural-educational models underlying them.

Between the Void and Emptiness: Ontological Paradox and Spectres of Nihilism in Alain Badiou’sBeing and Eventand Graham Priest’sOne

AbstractIn this study, I reconstruct and compare Alain Badiou’sBeing and Event(2005) and Graham Priest’sOne(2014), arguing that the ontologies pursued within the two texts are intriguingly analogous in a number of ways. Both Badiou and Priest are committed to thinking through classically ontological problems without denying the validity of the paradoxes they raise; both regard Plato’sParmenidesas an early and formative account of these paradoxes; both establish conclusions to the effect that unity – or “oneness” – is indeed a contradictory phenomenon; and both, as a corollary of this conclusion, develop frameworks which confer ontological prominence uponthe voidandemptinessrespectively, thereby arriving at what appears to be a shared ontological nihilism. In this comparative study, I not only enquire whether the frameworks adopted by Badiou and Priest really do lead to nihilist conclusions, but also attempt to clearly outline their trajectories of thought for the benefit of those who might be tempted to dismiss their seemingly outlandish theses out of hand.

QUANTUM THEOLOGY AND “‘WE’ AND ‘THEY’”

QUANTUM THEOLOGY AND “‘WE’ AND ‘THEY’”

QUANTUM THEOLOGY BEYOND COPENHAGEN: TAKING FUNDAMENTALISM LITERALLY

AbstractTheological engagement with quantum physics has, to this day, been dominated by the Copenhagen interpretation. However, philosophers and physicists working in the “quantum foundations” field have largely abandoned the Copenhagen view on account of what is widely seen as its troublesome antirealism. Other metaphysical approaches have come to the fore instead, which often take a strongly realist flavor, such as de Broglie‐Bohm, or Everett's “Many‐Worlds” interpretation. In the spirit of recent quantum foundations work, this article introduces a collection of studies aimed at taking quantum theology “beyond Copenhagen.” The present article advocates a commitment to “quantum fundamentalism,” which could resolve some of the enduring ontological problems faced by existing theological work with quantum mechanics, especially in discussions of quantum special divine action. Taking quantum fundamentalism literally would mean a departure from the Copenhagen interpretation, and the article suggests the need for a new research program to lay the groundwork in the natural theology of quantum foundations.

The End of “Putin’s Empire?” Ontological Problems of Russian Imperialism in the Context of the War against Ukraine, 2022

ABSTRACT Vladimir Putin seeks to build a modern Russian empire on the post-Soviet space, as confirmed by the invasion of Ukraine. In the present article, the author shows why modern Russia represents a geopolitical project called “Putin’s Empire,” and what the ideological justifications for this empire are. The author also proposes to consider what is happening as a clash of different forms of imperial orders—neoliberal democracy and the concept of the “Russian world.” The author concludes that Russia, as an empire, is in a protracted political crisis, but this does not mean the empire will disintegrate.

Ф.М. Достоевский в зарубежных научных исследованиях XXI века

This article attempts to provide an overview of foreign monographs and collective works that have been published in the 21st century, as well as some significant translations and reprints. This review cannot claim to provide an exhaustive overview of all authors’ approaches, but some conclusions can be drawn from it anyway. Firstly, the identified problems which are in the focus of contemporary researchers differ in many respects from those which were the focus of attention of researchers in previous decades, and this seems to be due to the issues that concern different generations. The focus of scholars’ attention is still on ontological problems, eternally troubling humans – questions of spirituality, good and evil, humanism and the limits of the mankind, however, more and more space is occupied by contemporary issues: intolerance, femininity, trauma, deviancy, cruelty, nihilism. In Dostoevsky’s works, researchers are attracted by the prophetic motifs of the consequences of the loss of spirituality and ethical foundations – and possible ways of redemption.

THE PICTURE OF THE WORLD IN APHORISTICS BY STANISŁAW J. LETZ

Based on the analysis of the axiology of dominants and worldview of Stanislaw Jerzy Letz, the article examines the features of the artist's world picture, which made a significant contribution to the world aphoristics of the twentieth century. The main factors that determined his ideological and artistic position are identified, and the philosophical nature of his work is emphasized. It is found out that the priorities for the writer are anthropocentric and ontological problems. In the center of the aphoristics by S. J. Letz an individual appears in their existential and axiological dimensions. Despite the dominant satirical pathos of the writer's work, the idea is proved that the positive programme of the thinker correlates with the moral foundations of life, with trust in a person. Humor and satire in the artistic system of Stanislaw Jerzy Letz become means of understanding the world and a kind of form of resistance against unacceptable reality. The role of cultural and historical memory, the connection of generations in overcoming universal evil is understood. There are selected concepts that identify the artist's world picture such as freedom, an individual, belief, time, law, history, a reason, power, an idea, and a word. The principles of the artistic structure of aphorisms are analyzed. Considerable attention is paid to the study of the means which allow one to get into the deep meaning of the utterances and expand their semantic capacity: paradoxical, metaphorical, parodic transformation, language play, associativity, oxymoronicity, and semantic shifts. The development of the concepts and vectors of intertextual connections, the features of their verbalization in the artist's world picture are considered on the specific examples. The complex system of internal overlaps between aphorisms is studied. They reflect various aspects of thought and illustrate its multidimensional nature, complexity of human existence, and at the same time encourage the reader to a dialogue and intensify their intellectual activity. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the genre specifics of Letz's aphoristic heritage, which, combining lyrical and satirical components, is distinguished by a philosophical view of the world. As a result of the study, it is claimed that the key to the author's picture of the world by Stanislaw Jerzy Letz is freedom as a philosophical and social category, freedom as a prerequisite for creativity.

Культурфилософский горизонт трудов П.П. Гайденко

Piama Pavlovna Gaidenko’s research program is recognized as one of the most important foundations of historical and philosophical thought in Russia. None of the modern Russian philosophers or historians of philosophy can say that Gaidenko’s works did not have any influence on them. For beginners in philoso­phy Gaidenko’s articles and books serve as a key and a reliable source of ap­proaching philosophical problems. For those who, with the help of Gaidenko, have already acquired the first guidelines in philosophy, her style of writing – clear, logical and concise – becomes a model of academic ductus. For the rest of the researchers the texts of P.P. Gaidenko create space for a conversation with a competent interlocutor. In this article I draw attention to the features of the his­torical and philosophical approach of P.P. Gaidenko, among which the most im­portant are: 1) the importance of cultural context, which, according to Gaidenko, is the basis of any spiritual action of a person; 2) Gaidenko’s characteristic inter­est in ontological problems and those philosophers for whom these questions were of prime importance; 3) the serious influence of Heidegger’s “history of Being” on the formation of Gaidenko’s concept of the types of rationality that successively replace each other. The clarification of these features will make it possible to understand why Gaidenko sees a way out of the scientific and ideo­logical crisis of modernity in turning to the ancient type of thinking, focused on the contemplation of physis.

Неперевод как палимпсест в непрозрачной поэзии

Ezra Pound’s “Pisan Cantos” is a multi-layered palimpsest rewritten and written over previous editions several times, in which the non-translation of quotes, sayings and headlines becomes an aesthetically significant device. Younger branches of complex poetry after 1945, on the one hand, overcome Pound’s total project, on the other, inherit him through this ‘gap’. Within the framework of this article, the author explores how hermetic poetry (language writing, metarealism and generation of the 21st century) uses non-translation and untrans­latable to create/express political and ontological problems corresponding to this gap. So, in “Drafts” by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, palimpsest exposes the very deployment of language, writing, the ‘trace’ of other languages — all this develops together with the optics of studying writing and the loosening of the dominant hierarchies of poetic subjectivity and artistic form. In the poetry of metarealists Arkady Dragomoshchenko and Alexei Parshchikov, non-translation serves as a way of creating palimpsest marginalia, structuring the perception of interweaving images both through donor text and through the transformation of its motives. And the discommunicative palimpsest of Ekaterina Zakharkiv’s poem “Hiroo Onoda” is based on the unrepresentative function of the non-translation, when the collision of different lan­guages, quotes and references creates both difficulty in perception and communicative faults in the narrative fabric of the work. Thus, the article is an attempt to derive points on a con­tour map of poetic practices, showing both the formation of a way of inter-linguistic inte­rac­tion within the text that is different from multilingualism, and the ways of inheritance through the rupture of the complex and ambiguous nature of Ezra Pound’s “Cantos”, which gave rise not only to a new type of modernist epic, but also a special type of poetic palimpsest.

Pojęcie obiektu kwantowego z pespektywy teorii integracji pojęciowej a problem ontologii mikroświata

W artykule wykazano nieadekwatność pojmowania mikroobiektów w kategoriach ontologii substancjalnych bytów jednostkowych i nieredukowalną metaforyczność takich pojęć, jak „cząstka”, „fala” czy „przedmiot indywidualny”. Podjęto próbę skonstruowania pojęcia obiektu kwantowego jako amalgamatu pojęciowego, wykorzystując teorię integracji pojęciowej.

INTEGRATING LARGE-SCALE ONTOLOGIES FOR ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL SYSTEMS VIA ADAPTIVE CO-EVOLUTIONARY NSGA-II

The identification, prediction, management, and control of economic and financial systems render extremely challenging tasks, which require comprehensively integrating the knowledge of different expert systems. Ontology, as a state-of-the-art knowledge modeling technique, has been extensively applied in the domain of economics and finance. However, due to ontology engineers’ subjectivity, ontology suffers from the heterogeneity issue, which hampers the co-operation among the intelligent expert system based on them. To address this issue, ontology matching for finding heterogeneous concept pairs between two ontologies has been rapidly developed. It is difficult to find the perfect ontology alignment that satisfies the needs of all decision-makers. Therefore, Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm, such as Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II), attracts many researchers’ attention. However, when facing large-scale ontology matching problems, NSGA-II tends to fall into local optimal solutions due to the large search space. To effectively address this drawback, we model the large-scale ontology problem as a nonlinear optimization problem, and propose an Adaptive Co-Evolutionary NSGA-II (ACE-NSGA-II) to deal with it. Compared with NSGA-II, ACE-NSGA-II introduces a co-evolutionary mechanism to increase the diversity of populations in order to decrease the probability of premature convergence. In particular, ACE-NSGA-II uses an adaptive population maintenance strategy to assign more resources toward the dominant ones in order to improve the solution efficiency for solving large-scale ontology matching. The experiment utilizes the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI)’s benchmark and anatomy track to test the effectiveness of ACE-NSGA-II, and the resulting experiment demonstrated that compared to NSGA-II and OAEI’s participants, ACE-NSGA-II is able to find better alignment.

ON THE POSSIBILITY OF A RATIONAL CONCEPT OF ABSOLUTE NON-BEING

The subject of research is the problem of non-existence, or rather absolute nothingness. This is one of the central ontological problems as it is, in essence, one of the formulations of the first principle problem.This paper directly addresses the problem of nothingness from the perspective of the approach that identi-fies itself as a «philosophy of nothingness». According to this approach, substance is claimed to be abso-lute nothingness, which gives rise to existence. Currently, there can be distinguished three varieties in the «philosophy of nothingness»: rationalistic (dialectical), irrational (metaphysical), and radical (absolute, total). The immediate objective of this study is to analyze the possibility of identifying absolute nothing-ness by rational means. This possibility is declared by a rationalist version of the «philosophy of nothing-ness». The problem is considered in the paper from the point of view of dialectical methodology, which is also used in rationalist «philosophy of nothingness». The study shows the difficulty of substantializationof nothingness. The author provides arguments for the impossibility of a consistent rational concept of absolute nothingness. It is concluded that the problem of the relationship between existence and non-existence can be rationally solved only through consistent dialectical methodology. This methodology denies substantialist obscurity and implies a substantialist dialectical relationship between being and noth-ingness as the essential characteristics of the first principle. A positive value of the «philosophy of noth-ingness» is that draws attention to the ontological study of the first principle, makes it possible to look beyond the traditional understanding of this problem. The study results can be helpful in the search for a universally accepted ontological definition of matter.

Double Index. The Self-Shadow in American Photography of the Second Half of the 20th Century

The article focuses on the notion of the image of self-shadow in American photography in the second half of the twentieth century, understood as a shadow silhouette of the creator captured in a photograph. The two main problems that concern the author’s research are the lack of current, theoretical study on the problem of shadow in the history of photography from the perspective of art history (V. Stoichita, R. Casati, P. Cavanagh, H. Kanaan) and the lack of the definition of the phenomenon of self-shadow and its possible types in self-portraiture. The author’s proposition of a definition of self-shadow is based on selected photographs by four artists whose works touch upon the problem of shadow in the context of relations between the “self” and the “other” (Lee Friedlander), race and subjective invisibility (Shawn W. Walker), mask and the other-self (Andy Warhol), and the intimate recording of identity (Nan Goldin). In her analyses, the author discusses the problem of the hybrid ontology of the shadow, which is both visible and visual. In this understanding, the shadow not only refers to a physical body, present “here and now” but more importantly evokes a sense of presence, even when the artist’s body is absent in the picture. The double index refers to the image leaving its mark both in reality and on light-sensitive paper. The rudimentary, vitalistic relation linking the human body with its shadow is only a starting point for analyses of the complexity of its status and symbolism. The concepts framing Andy Warhol’s Polaroid are twinning, the mask, and the Jungian theory of the shadow archetype. To discuss the self-portrait of Shawn W. Walker, the author applies the literary-philosophical concept of invisibility based on writings from Black existentialists (W.E.B. Du Bois, F. Fanon, R. Ellison). The analyses of Lee Friedlander’s photograph have been based on the psychological distinction between the figures of the “self” and the “other”. The closing concepts that frame Nan Goldin’s self-portrait are the haptic thinking subject (M. Smolińska) and the notion of a diary. The critical apparatus of the study is supplemented by contemporary analyses of the myth of Narcissus, the mythical origins of the self-portrait, and the notion of the index (after R. Krauss, M. Michałowska, M.A. Doane).

Проблемное поле и категориальные структуры философии соборности А.С. Хомякова

The article deals with the philosophical concept of the outstanding Russian thinker A.S. Khomyakov (1804–1860). The system method and historical and philosophical reconstruction are used. The categorical structures of its concept are analyzed, the content of the basic category is revealed. The main ideological sources of Khomyakov's worldview are determined. It is argued that the development of categorical structures of the thinker's concept is based on his reflections on the church. It is revealed that in the work “The Church is One” Khomyakov for the first time the concept of sobornost is introduced, having become the fundamental basis of his entire concept. It is proved that the doctrine of sobornost contains the basic principles developed by the philosopher in his ontology and epistemology, historiosophy and social theory. It is shown that in the era of widespread dissemination in Russia of the teachings of German philosophers, A.S. Khomyakov showed himself as a subtle and deep analyst who sharply criticized the results of the development of German theoretical thought. As a result of the carried out textual analysis, the general architecture and logical connections of the categorical structures of the thinker's concept are determined. It is demonstrated that the philosopher does not stop at studying the main directions of contemporary philosophy – he develops his own, original solution to the main problems of ontology and the theory of cognition. The paper analyzes the work of Khomyakov “Notes on world history”, designed to give a holistic understanding of world history, its meaning and direction. It is shown that the concept developed in it to a certain extent was an alternative to the Hegel model of the historical process. The article concludes that the development of categorical structures of the philosophy of sobornost of A.S. Khomyakov retains its importance for modern theoretical thought.

A Naïve Realist Rumination on the Roth-and-Dewulf versus Currie-and-Swaim Exchange

Abstract The paper presents a realist perspective on the recent exchange in the Journal of the Philosophy of History between Adrian Currie and Daniel Swaim on the one side and Paul Roth and Fons Dewulf on the other. The first part presents a critique of Currie and Swaim’s view that the past is not determinate and can be changed. The second part states a series of arguments against Roth’s view that events exist only under description. The third part discusses the ontological problems that Roth’s irrealism about the past fails to address.

The Role of Quantum Mechanics in Understanding the Phenomenon of Consciousness

The article analyzes the effectiveness of quantum theories of mental experience in relation to two ontological problems - the problem of the existence of consciousness in the material world and the problem of the interaction of consciousness and body. A critical analysis of the quantum theories of consciousness by Penrose-Hameroff, M. Tegmark, G. Stapp, M. Fischer and M.B. Mensky shows that they fail to fully explain how complex physical systems generate mental experience without violating the principle of causal closure of the physical world and the principle of epistemological completeness of physics. Quantum mechanics provides specific processes that are the physical basis of the psyche, but do not explain the phenomenal aspect of subjective reality. Nevertheless, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle gives an understanding of how the interaction of consciousness and body within the scientific picture of the world can be carried out without violating the law of energy conservation. It is shown that the quantum theories of consciousness currently being developed have a predominantly panprotopsychic character, which faces a problem due to the fact that the protomental property of physical systems must be expressed quantitatively and correspond to the value included in the physical equations. As a result, it is concluded that in order to develop quantum theories of consciousness more effectively, it is necessary to give an emergent character, not jumping from the quantum level to the psychic, but explaining the mechanism of the emergence of systemic properties during the sequential transition between different ontological regions of existence, including physical, chemical, biological, neurophysiological and psychic.

ON A NEW APPROACH TO PEIRCE’S THREE-VALUE PROPOSITIONAL LOGIC

Even though it is obvious that mathematics involves social activities, this rather trivial fact is rarely considered as important for its subject matter, mostly due to its undesired ontological consequences. An attempted solution for this tension was developed by Julian Cole’s institutional account of mathematics, named Practice- Dependent Realism. In the present paper, Cole’s account is evaluated, and its lights and shadows assessed concerning the ontological problem that he seeks to solve. I argue that his institutional account, although failing in delivering a sufficient ontological account of mathematics, still opens an important linguistic route for explaining its practice.

Spectral Dickens: The Uncanny Forms of Novelistic Characterization by Alexander Bove

Reviewed by: Spectral Dickens: The Uncanny Forms of Novelistic Characterization by Alexander Bove Gillian Piggott (bio) Alexander Bove. Spectral Dickens: The Uncanny Forms of Novelistic Characterization. Manchester UP, 2021. Pp. iv + 242. $120.00. ISBN 978-1-5261-4793-6 (hb). This is an exciting read for those of us long troubled by the old adage that Dickens is a "failed realist" who does not create convincing characters. For George Eliot, Dickens failed to create interiority, while many a student has complained that Dickens's characters are sketchy distortions or caricatures, stagey, melodramatic, externally observed, unnatural. For the author of Spectral Dickens, this apparent failure in Dickens's characterization is more to do with limited critical horizons than with Dickens: the problem lies in the framing of the critical debate as to what character is. Dickens meanwhile escapes all coordinates; his haunting characters "inspire imaginative and nuanced critical responses and yet elude systemization" (2). Bove argues that there are two leading critical camps on "character": structuralist/poststructuralist theories which view characters as representations, an effect of a signifying system, and mimetic theories that see characters as "reflections of 'real-world' persons or selves" (2). Both of these critical camps miss the central problem of subjectivity and ontology. Harnessing a number of critical theories that debunk the idea of "the stable, whole Subject"–the Freudian "Uncanny," Derridean "specters" and "hauntology," and most importantly, the Lacanian "Real"–Bove argues that character stages our own existential/ontological lack. Indeed, character enacts a distinct kind of encounter with otherness/instability which expresses "the stumbling block" of being (Zupančič 43; qtd. in Bove 10)–the Subject's inability to be fully self-present to itself and to the world, our inability to access "the Real." To explain, and alas to simplify hugely: mimesis involves the idea that a character is a simulacrum of a "real" person, while a "real" person itself involves the concept of a self–present conscious "subjectivity." Yet this subject's self-present fullness is itself fatally problematic–it is plagued by the problem of the relations between the subject, language and "the Real." Lacan says our access to the "the Real" is obstructed by a dilemma: "reality itself is always already constituted for the subject by language, and the [End Page 532] Real is ultimately precisely the … element of nonrelation between reality and itself."1 As a result, according to Lacan, there is something originally wounded in the human relation to the world, in our entering into the social world of the Symbolic. Character for Bove, then, "can be said to stage not an encounter with a simulacrum of a 'real person,' but an encounter with the Real" (23). And he continues: "Character is specter … not limited to subjectivity or interiority, in a mimetic sense, nor to clusters of words. It is frequently ... made of various forces, some subjectivizing, some de-subjectivizing." Bove's view is that character enacts "an-other mode of the non-relation, the uncanny" (24). It's a wonderful idea–one could go as far as suggesting the reason characters are so important to us in life and often live with us beyond their literary or filmic context is because they enact the central problematic of our existence–they repeatedly return to and, as it were, pull at the scab of "the cut of the Real" (61). Staging our vulnerability, and foregrounding the incompleteness and instability of our subjectivity, characters continually gesture to a point in a meaningful universe where meaning breaks down, where there is a gap. "We … sometimes perceive character as uncanny forms–not as safely confined to the order of representation, but as haunting us with our own lack of presence from within that safely defined 'order of the real'" (11). Characters are "uncanny" because something familiar (a character) converts into its other, as its lack of presence in representation resembles our own. Bove uses the notion of "hauntology" interchangeably with "ontology," as if he sees "ontology" as framed by the process of the repetitive return of the repressed lack of self-presence, of wholeness, and the attempt to bury it again. It follows that "identification," a central tenet of mimetic theories, is...

Caliban, His Woman, and the Gendered (In)humanism of Wild Seed

SUMMARYIn this article, I begin with a broad question for anthropological philosophy—what is the human?—to turn toward a related question for social analysis: How did the concept of gender become a constitutive part of being human? Octavia Butler's speculative historical novel, Wild Seed (1980), troubles gender's conceptual metaphysics, serving as a precursor for the exploration of an alternative humanism found in Sylvia Wynter's “Beyond Miranda's Meanings: Un/silencing the ‘Demonic Ground' of Caliban's ‘Woman’” (1990). By anticipating Wynter's reading of Caliban and his missing, desired “woman,” Butler inverts the demonic grounds of negated progeny, reproduction, and patriarchal authority. In addition to speculating about the ontology of racialized femaleness, Wild Seed situates embodied maleness as an equal ontological problem. While Caliban is overly embodied, lacking patriarchal masculinity and its reproductive trappings, Wild Seed reintroduces the ontological problem of genderless embodiment through the native's/African's masculinity. Butler explores unthinkable human existence through the question of how gender pairs became a constitutive aspect of the human, rather than by focusing on one half of a gender binary over another. “(In)humanism” is conceptually provisional, intended to illustrate the transitional reason that underlies both formation and disappearance of what counts as humanness. [human, gender, Sylvia Wynter, Octavia Butler, embodiment]

Cognitive ontology and the search for neural mechanisms: three foundational problems

The central task of cognitive neuroscience to map cognitive capacities to neural mechanisms faces three interlocking conceptual problems that together frame the problem of cognitive ontology. First, they must establish which tasks elicit which cognitive capacities, and specifically when different tasks elicit the same capacity. To address this operationalization problem, scientists often assess whether the tasks engage the same neural mechanisms. But to determine whether mechanisms are of the same or different kinds, we need to solve the abstraction problem by determining which mechanistic differences are and are not relevant, and also the boundary problem by distinguishing the mechanism from its background conditions. Solving these problems, in turn, requires understanding how cognitive capacities are elicited in tasks. These three problems, which have been noted and discussed elsewhere in the literature, together form a ‘cycle of kinds’ that frames the central problem-space of cognitive ontology. We describe this cycle to clarify the intellectual challenges facing the cognitive ontologist and to reveal the kind of iterative process by which ontological revision in cognitive neuroscience is likely to unfold.