RELATED TERMS: Computer Science; Epistemology; Information science; Methodology and Method; Ontological Designing; Ontological Metalepsis; Ontological Turn; Phenomenology; Philosophy; World-Building;
“J. L. Austin once quipped that existence was ‘like breathing only quieter’.” (Garrett, 2006: xiv)
Ontology, Metaphysics, Philosophy … Design
Ontology is a much contested term. For example, it may be used to refer to an essential structure of reality. In that case, it is roughly a synonym for metaphysics, understood as the discourse that seeks to establish ultimate grounds and ends. It may also, however, refer to a particular form of analysis that affirms the idea that knowledge claims about the world are also interpretations of what sorts of entities there are to be known and, simultaneously, a certain ethical positioning of the subject of knowledge in relation to the world so interpreted (Nichols, 2014: 58).
Thus, ontology may refer to that which constitutes reality and/or the systematic study of that which constitutes reality. For Johanna Oksala (2012), it is politics that mediates between these two different senses of ontology. In this context, Oksala argues that the radicalness of Foucault’s method lies in showing how the ontological order of things is in itself the outcome of a political struggle.
A similar point about the ambiguity inherent in the term ontology is made by Agamben (2016) when he states that it is well known that,
“in Indo-European languages the verb “to be” generally has a double meaning: the first meaning corresponds to a lexical function, which expresses the existence and reality of something (‘God is,’ that is, exists), while the second — the copula — has a purely logico-grammatical function and expresses the identity between two terms (‘God is good’).”
(Agamben, 2016: 117-118)
What is being argued here is that design practices, as material practices, mediate between these two different senses of ontology, just as much as do political practices, as highlighted by Oksala. One way of saying this might be to argue that
designs, of whatever level of complexity from artefacts to infrastructural and digital systems, are responses to ontological questions about what is the case in terms of how questions about what is known to be the case, what ought to be the case and what might be the case are articulated or entangled.
Ontological inquiry is, therefore, of crucial importance for design as professional practice, as academic discipline, as element of communal social practice and as material public discourse, whether as part of public pedagogy or public governance. In as far as designed outputs, in whatever form, take part in the constitution, the interpretation and the evaluation of reality, they are, at once, ontological, epistemological, axiological, historical and speculative in character: they assert their own existence as ‘what there is’; semiotically, they ‘speak’, ‘articulate’ or ‘argue’ for a particular understanding of the real. ‘To design’, as material-semiotic construction, articulation and argument, may be understood as analogous to ‘to say’. Thus, in some way, designing, saying, becoming and being become indistinct. The basis for the analogy is to be found in Agamben who explains,
“Legein, ‘to say,’ means in Greek ‘to gather and articulate beings by means of words’: onto-logy. But in this way, the distinction between saying and being remains uninterrogated, and it is the opacity of their relation that will be transmitted by Aristotle to Western philosophy …”
(Agamben, 2016: 117)
Thus, inheriting this ambiguity, designs may be said to gather together and articulate beings by means of ‘signs’, not necessarily but also including words. That is the character of their action, their actantiality: they have a lexical function (concerning existence and existents); they have a logico-grammatical function (establishing identities, equivalences); they have an axiological function (concerning what ought to be the case); and they have an epistemological function (reinforcing or questioning what is known to be the case). All of these are woven into their presupposed utilitarian function, their use-value.
If the end of metaphysics is understood as referring to the acceptance of the indeterminacy of reason and the fundamental contingency and singularity of the present, it must, as Derrida never tires of demonstrating, also involve a paradox. To argue for the contingency and indeterminacy of the present, Oksala points out, is precisely to make an ontological claim, which entails a metaphysical commitment and serves as an unquestioned starting point of philosophical inquiry. When we argue against one metaphysical schema, for example, the existence of absolute foundations and pure origins, we cannot help but adopt another. The idea that all ontological orders are nothing but contingent arrangements cannot be established by empirical sciences, but must be argued for philosophically.
If modern thought has become irreversibly aware that all thinking necessarily relies on ontological commitments of some kind, and exposing them to a clear view has become one of the critical tasks of philosophy, including political philosophy, as Oksala maintains, then it is also a critical task of design, as mode of practice, discipline, pedagogy and governance, if it comes at the, ever paradoxical, end of metaphysics and philosophy.
Ontology, Metaphysics, Philosophy #2
In philosophy, ontology is the inquiry into, or theory of, being. It was coined in the early 17th century in order to avoid some of the ambiguities of the term ‘metaphysics’. It has come to mean the general theory of what there is, of what exists. As the study of being, ontology includes, at the very least, the study of what is, or what exists, including the study of the nature of specific existents; and the study of how existents exist.
In outlining his position on ontology, Levi Bryant (2012), for example, states that,
“As a discourse, ontology seeks to articulate the most general and fundamental nature of being or of what is and what is not. Ontology and being are not the same. Being consists of what is regardless of whether there is any discourse about it. Ontology is a discourse about what is. This distinction is important because ontologies, as discourses about the being of beings, can be mistaken. There is no discourse that doesn’t presuppose an ontology or metaphysics (I use the two terms as synonyms).”
Tony Lawson (2015) notes that the term ‘ontologia’ appears to have been coined in 1613 by two philosophers working independently of each other, Jacob Lorhard, in Theatrum Philosophicum and Rudolf Göckel in Lexicon Philosophicum. According to Øhrstrøm, Andersen and Schärfe (2005), this is incorrect. The term, they note, had already occurred in Jacob Lorhard’s book Ogdoas scholastica from 1606, where the word ‘ontologia’ appears on the frontispiece, used synonymously with “metaphysica”. In its English form, the first occurrence of ontology seems to be in Bailey’s 1721 Dictionary, where it is defined as ‘an account of being in the abstract’. Thus, ontology as the science or study of being should be distinguished from both epistemology, which is a concern with knowledge, and methodology proper, a concern with method.
Ontology in Philosophy and Computer Science
This usage of the term should not be confused with that in computer science and information science where an ontology is a representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the properties of that domain and may be used to define the domain. As Øhrstrøm, Andersen and Schärfe (2005) state, “Where philosophical ontology has been concerned with the furniture and entities of reality, i.e., with the study of “being qua being”, computer scientists have been occupied with the development of formalized, semantic, and logic-based models, which can easily be implemented in computer systems.”
Discussion
Across a range of academic disciplines, researchers have made what is sometimes termed an ‘ontological turn’. This reflects a change of emphasis away from the epistemological and discursive (or, indeed, ‘representational’ or ‘mimetologogical’) approaches dominant in the 20th century towards a greater emphasis, emerging towards the end of the 20th century, upon the entanglement of epistemology and ontology in material social practices.
Examples include the work of Descola (2013, 2005) and Latour (1988), who have emerged as path-breakers in the ontological turn, having developed the two most formidable and productive approaches to an ontological anthropology (Kelly, 2014). A further example can be seen in the work of Dell’Alba in the field of education in which, in her conceptualisation of learning, there is a shift in focus from epistemology in itself to epistemology in the service of ontology (Dall’Alba and Barnacle, 2007).
Such a body of literature concerning the relationship between epistemology and ontology has considerable relevance to design practices. In the processes of designing, the designer will make various assumptions about what exists in the world and what can be considered to be real. In doing this, the designer is making certain ontological assumptions and perhaps challenging them by considering the conditions in which such entities, existents and realities emerge and are sustained.
As noted above, historically ontology is the branch of philosophy and of metaphysics that is concerned to establish the nature of the fundamental kinds of thing which exist in the world or the “nature of being”, what the world is and consists of. Examples of philosophical ontological theory include Plato’s theory of ‘forms’ and, more recently, scientific realism, which asks what kinds of thing are presupposed by scientific theories.
However, while philosophy can inform discussions in different disciplines, it is no longer regarded as the kind of final arbiter it was once assumed to be. Ontologies will change as knowledge and individual sciences and modes of study change. In sociological theory, for example, much of the debate since Comte has been broadly ontological in nature. This debate has done much to clarify the nature, while also underlining the very complexity, of social reality.
Furthermore, ontological arguments are an explicit or implicit feature of particular kinds of disciplinary theory, such as in sociological theory with Durkheim’s conception of ‘social acts’, the emphasis on individual actors in Weber and the symbolic interactionism and Marx’s emphasis on materialism and modes and relations of production.
Ontology has to do with the assumptions different social groups make about the kinds of entities taken to exist ‘in the real world.’ This definition does not entail a strong realist position, i.e. concerning a common or universal underlying reality. However, this does not mean the ‘the mind’ constructs the world. It is not a kind of subjectivism. What this definition seeks to bring to attention is the existence of multiple worlds without negating the real. Our ontological stances about what the world is, what we are, and how we come to know the world define our being, our doing, and our knowing, our historicity.
A complex definition of ontology that draws out these dimensions is provided by Blaser (2010), who proposes three-layers. The first layer concerns the assumptions about the kinds of beings that exist and their conditions of existence. The second layer refers to ways in which these ontologies give rise to particular socio-natural configurations, how they perform themselves, so to speak, into worlds. In other words, ontologies do not precede or exist independently of our everyday practices. The third layer occurs when ontologies manifest themselves as stories, which make the underlying assumptions easier to identify. This layer is amply corroborated by the ethnographic literature on myths and rituals, for example, creation myths. It also exists in the modern world, in the narratives that we, ‘moderns’, tell ourselves about ourselves, and which are repeated over and over by politicians in their speeches, or in the insistent news renditions of ‘what happens in the world.’
In an introduction to Heidegger’s The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Albert Hofstadter (1988) argues that human behaviour is mediated by the understanding-of-being. If ontological means of or belonging to the understanding of being, then the human Dasein is, by its very constitution, an ontological being. This does not mean that the human being has an explicit concept of being, which s/he then applies in every encounter with beings. Rather, it means that before all ontology, as explicit discipline of thinking, the human Dasein always already encounters beings in terms of a pre-ontological, pre-conceptual, non-conceptual grasp of their being. Ontology as a scientific discipline is then the unfolding, in the light proper to thought and therefore in conceptual form, of this pre-conceptual understanding-of- being (Willis, 2006 96, n9).
The relevance of ontology, given this layered complexity, for design practices can be made very clear. Its relevance is strengthened by the fact that designers use material elements to articulate meaning, further complicating the relationships between the epistemological and ontological premises and presumptions embodied in and performed by such material entities. In this context, metalepsis may be understood as transgressions across different modes of existence conceived as a tangled hierarchy. This relevance is further established when one considers relational ontologies and ontological design.
Relational ontologies
A relational ontology proposes that nothing pre-exists the relations that constitute it. In such ontologies, life is inter-relation and inter-dependency through and through. Buddhism, through the principle of inter being, has one of the most succinct and powerful notions in this regard: nothing exists by itself, everything inter-exists, we inter-are with everything on the planet. A different perspective on this is provided by phenomenological biology through the notion that there is an “unbroken coincidence of our being, our doing, and our knowing” (Maturana and Varela, 1987: 35). Maturana and Varela (1987: 26) express this recognition aphoristically as follows: “All doing is knowing, and all knowing is doing”; and “every act of knowing brings forth a world”. The coincidence of saying and being, as noted by Agamben above, as well as the coincidence of doing and knowing, as noted by Maturana and Varela, implies that we are deeply interactively immersed in the world along with other sentient beings.
Relational ontologies are those which eschew the divisions between nature and culture, between individual and community and between us and them that are central to modern ontology. The emergence of relational ontologies challenges the epistemic foundation of modern politics. The political activation of relational ontologies enables a different way of imagining life and other modes of existence, pointing towards the pluriverse, which can be described as ‘a world where many worlds fit’ (Cadena and Blaser, eds, 2018). In many such mobilisations, for example, against mining in South America, the activation of relational ontologies politicise modern binaries by mobilising non-humans, for example, mountains and water, as sentient entities and as actors [actants] in the political arena. Struggles against the destruction of life are thus conjuring up the entire range of the living.
Ontological designing
A concept of ontological designing was Initially proposed by Winograd and Flores (1986) in the mid 1980s. The most important design, they suggest is ontological, as it constitutes an intervention into the ground of our heritage, growing from already-existent ways of being in the world, that into which we are ‘thrown’, and deeply affecting the kinds of beings that we are.
Ontologically-oriented designing, they continue, is therefore both reflective and political: it looks back to the traditions that have formed us; and forwards to the as-yet-uncreated transformations of our lives together. Through the emergence of new tools and environments, we come to a changing awareness of human nature and human action. In turn, this leads to new technological development. The design process is part of this movement through which the structure of possibilities for current and future worlds are generated. Thus, Winograd and Flores (1986: 179) argue,
“In ontological designing, we are doing more than asking what can be built. We are engaging in a philosophical discourse about the self – about what we can do and what can be. Tools are fundamental to action, and through our actions we generate the world. The transformation we are concerned with is not a technical one, but a continuing evolution of how we understand our surroundings and ourselves – of how we continue becoming the beings we are.”
However, Escobar suggests that ontological designing remains relatively undeveloped so far. Ontological designing, for Escobar, is one possibility for contributing to the transition from the hegemony of modernity’s One-World ontology to a pluriverse of socio-natural configurations. In this context, designs for the pluriverse become a tool for reimagining and reconstructing sustainable worlds.
Taken as the interaction between understanding and creation, designing is ontological in that it is a conversation about possibilities. It is about the making of worlds and knowledges otherwise, that is, worlds and knowledges constructed on the basis of different ontological commitments, likely to yield collective ways of living less marked by modernist forms of domination. This brings to attention more explicitly the politics of design.
References
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Blaser, Mario. 2010. Storytelling: globalization from the Chaco and beyond. Durham: Duke University Press.
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