7 responses to “A Philosophical Ecology”

1. Ontology just gives us the general form of what are otherwise disparate empirical cases. It’s a way to avoid re-inventing the wheel every time we approach a new site of enquiry.

   • sounds Adam good but still waiting for one that works off the page.

     • I’m not sure we’ll ever get one that works right off the page. An ontology should be revisable, an experiment or a wager, as Stengers likes to say. However, an ontology can be more or less consistently applied given certain circumstances. For example, the claim that “if we want to know otherwise we must become otherwise” stands as a basic rule that connects us to the most general requirements entailed by learning—i.e., that humans are the type of thing that require some kind of transformation to acquire new knowledge, and this seems to stand as a basic feature of our condition regardless of circumstance.

     • hmm sounds more like what I call a proto-type than ontology, Annemarie Mol (with her usual wicked humor) calls them something like local ontologies (note the plural, to the chagrin of my spellchecker), but rather than paraphrase a much better writer than I:
       http://somatosphere.net/2014/03/a-readers-guide-to-the-ontological-turn-part-4.html

     • ps yes to do things differently we need new ways/skills of doing things; and we do what we be and we be what we do…

2. I do appreciate the Mol / STS approach, but I get a little worried that it conflates the ontological with the epistemic—even via appeals to enaction and the like. As you may recall, I swing a little bit more towards the speculative realist wing on this issue, preferring to re-habilitate these old categories in new ways: http://knowledge-ecology.com/2014/02/21/three-types-of-pluralism/

   • I think that it comes down to practice, as in the ‘application’ of something like an ontology, how can it not go like the supposed application of principles (as in principle “based” ethics) where to get going (even in a “close” reading/interpretation as St.Fish and others have noted) we need to flesh out the abstraction to get going with particulars/details, and thereby replace what we started with with something else.
     something that we can handle/grasp, made/used by those involved out of what (including who) was at hand (and all the power-dynamics, etc). I know you are reading some Wittgenstein and there is a similar appreciation there of the sort of infinite logical regresses of rule-following and reason-giving.