Ontology, Ontotheology, and Society

Heidegger criticized “ontotheology,” which in the present context might be construed as advocacy of static, precise, complete, eternally valid categorizations of what is, either altogether, or in some limited domain. Not to be outdone, French post-structuralists considered intertextuality, deconstruction, writerly texts, etc. Sociologists of science observe the intensely political and ethical aspects of classification systems, plus their malleability, evolution, and local interpretation. Ethnomethodologists emphasize the negotiable, situated, embodied, emergent character of all human activity, including classification. Cognitive linguistics and psychology study categorization, conceptual domains, metaphor and blending, with surprising results. All this motivates skepticism about many claims for ontologies in the technical sense of the Semantic Web, database integration, etc., despite the undoubted applicability of this technology to many specific problems. What can emerge from carefully considering skeptical arguments, hyperbolic claims, technical advances, and logical foundations (including recent work by this author on integrating databases by integrating their schemas and ontologies, is a balanced assessment of what seems possible and desirable, versus what seems impossible and undesirable, as well as a plea for greater humility, better ethics, better theory, and greater humanity.