The World of SPLectrum
Ontology — the concepts of the language
In SPLectrum’s philosophy, ontology is the field concerned with the concepts — the language tools a community creates and holds in common, the structure at rest. Reality is disclosed in language; what language relates are concepts, and a concept is a chunk of meaning wrapped into a being. A being is one by its difference from the others, and that difference is the whole of what it is. A concept has no content held apart from where it sits among the rest — it is not a thing first and related second, but constituted in the relating. There are no separate things.
One of three fields
It is one of three fields working together. Epistemology is concerned with experience — the learning loop, the tooling in motion as a subject works the private and the shared. Aesthetics is concerned with the dynamic — those same concepts tied and worked into expression. Ontology is concerned with the concepts themselves, held still: the vocabulary at rest, and the question of how its concepts come to be chosen.
The difference is not one of access. It is not that the concepts hide something behind them; it is that there is no behind — a being is exhausted by its place among the others. Ontology holds that vocabulary still and asks what it is made of and how it is cut.
The vocabulary is chosen
A concept is a chunk of meaning wrapped into a word, and the wrapping could fall in more than one place. Which chunks get wrapped, and where the lines between them run, is the ontological work — and it is done well or badly. Well-chosen concepts let the relations among them work cleanly, holding distinctions the community needs to draw; poorly-chosen ones blur what should be told apart, or split what is better held as one. The measure is not a fit to seams in reality — there are none to answer to — but the aptness of the vocabulary to itself and to the use it is put to. The vocabulary is not read off reality; it is made, and the making can be more or less apt.
Contingent and specific to a language
Because the vocabulary is made, it could have been different. We created it. The concepts a community wraps are its own, and another community wraps others — the ontology of a religion is its own vocabulary of beings, shared in part with its neighbours, the same as none. There is no single vocabulary standing over the languages to which they all answer.
Yet these vocabularies are not sealed. Variations converge on a common catalogue through sharing, and that shared store, held in common and always open to the next concept that does not fit, is how a reality grows richer and across scales evolves. The vocabulary is contingent at the root and convergent in the holding.
See also: The core values · Aesthetics — the dynamics of meaning — the same concepts in motion · Epistemology — learning and knowing — the same tooling in the learning loop · Ontology (close affinity) — where this account is read across the field