Question

What does "ontological" mean?

In the excerpt from the encyclopedia entry on Feminist Ethics, the authors used the term "ontological" in describing the foundation of the various feminist approaches.

"Ontology" is a branch, or field, of Philosophy. In this field, philosophers investigate "reality" or "existence."

To do so, they attempt to answer questions like: What is the nature of reality? What exists fundamentally? What is the "bottom-line" of all that is?

We can ask these ontological questions about specific things, too, like human beings.

Feminist argue that the ontological question "What is a human being" has been answered as if it were actually the question "What is a man?" In other words, men answered the question about what is real by examining their experiences and then universalizing this for all human beings. As a result, women were ignored and/or found to be morally deficient.

For example, Aristotle claimed that women had barely enough reason to handle household matters, like knowing how to keep food stocked(!). Contrasting men an women, he wrote "a man would be thought a coward if he were only as brave as a brave woman..." Politics,1227b.

You can see why feminist thinkers challenged this idea of "reality." They sought to correct the "ontological status" of men and women.

Answer 1

• In general, ontology is the study or concern about what kinds of things exist - what entities there are in the universe. It derives from the Greek onto (being) and logia (written or spoken discourse). It is a branch of metaphysics , the study of first principles or the essence of things.As a rule of thumb we can say that ontology asks what questions, while metaphysics asks how questions.
• The positivist ontology believes that the world is external and that there is a single objective reality to any research phenomenon or situation regardless of the researcher’s perspective or belief.
• The methods of ontology vary according to the extent to which the ontologist wishes to rely upon other disciplines and the nature of the disciplines he wishes to rely upon. The most common method since the 20th century, the logical or linguistic method, relied upon theories of meaning or reference—as applied to either artificial logical languages or to natural languages—to dictate the kinds of entity that exist.
• To take an example, we distinguish between particular objects and their features, such as the color and shape and weight of this leaf. This distinction is presupposed in all the sciences. Thus hypotheses or "theories" about this distinction, about what it is to be a property or a particular, do not fall within any of the other sciences. This is typical of an ontological issue.
• Ontology can be confusing because it all depends on how you wish to determine the nature of “being”. If you consider that humans interpret their environment by using an inner model then you may consider that the model is what defines the state of “being”.
• If you consider that humans are machines that assess and integrate with an objective environment then the state of “being” may be considered the dynamics of this interaction.
• If you consider the objects and events that cause a perception to be the most significant part of the equation then, for you, the environment may be the state of “being”.
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