Q&A: Ontology
Ontology
Question
Suppose we have a furniture set: five chairs and a table.
Two philosophers are arguing about whether a furniture set is an additional entity beyond the individual items (the five chairs and the table).
The first philosopher says yes—that is, a new entity is created when the furniture is put together.
The second philosopher says no—there are only five chairs and a table, and “furniture set” is just a useful label.
In your opinion, is their argument about reality itself / a concept / an abstract entity, or is it a semantic dispute, purely about the use of words?
Answer
You’d have to ask them, not me. But if you take the analogue, like a dispute about a collective versus its individual members, then in my view that is an ontic dispute and not merely a semantic one. The same goes for the relationship between a person and the cells that make him up: it’s not reasonable to say that a person is merely a concept and not something that actually exists.
Discussion on Answer
That is not necessarily postmodernism, since here he is referring only to this specific issue. If he empties all disputes of content and turns them into semantics, that is postmodernism.
As for the matter itself, I disagree. He assumes that the dispute is semantic, but that is his own (unargued) position. I am making an ontic claim.
The claim that no ontological framework is preferable actually says something else entirely: that it cannot be decided. But that does not mean the dispute is semantic.
By the way, what would he say about the dispute over the existence of God? Is that too merely semantics about the concept of “existence”?
I saw that the philosopher Dr. Eli Hirsch (the brother of Rabbi Moshe Hillel Hirsch) argues, for example in your case, where you take the side that it has ontic significance to say that the collective is not the sum of its members but a separate entity,
that there is no single correct answer to this question, because the question depends on the linguistic framework we are using.
In short, it’s all semantics!
There is one *language* in which we say, “society is an independent entity” (that is, the collective exists separately from the individuals).
There is another *language* in which we say, “there are only individuals, and the collective is simply a convenient description of a group of people” (that is, the collective does not exist independently).
Both descriptions are equally valid, and no one ontological framework is preferable to the other. There is no meaning to the question “what really exists”—the meaning of “exists” depends on our language and our conceptual system.
In your view, is this postmodernism (which you reject and criticize)?