Kurt Cagle has put up an interesting post on what ontology is for beginning readers. https://substack.com/home/post/p-138645438 is the post and I would advise you to come back here and see my reply to ontology and its role in fiction. A guide to ontology itself can be referenced here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology with the usual caveats that Wikipedia is only a beginning not a completion of any particular topic.
Ontology is fundamentally the metaphysical study of being. This is why you see being in several philosophical tracts and being questioned about being taken several steps back to analyze what is being and what impact this has on a particular philosophical idea. Of course, if you are old school and start everything with Plato and Aristotle you would wave people to The Sophist and Categories. While I am capable of slinging around ancient Greek with the best of them, ontology is often experienced in drama as well. For example, Oedipus at its root is asking the question what does being represented in terms of power? And the answer in various dramas is that simply being is not sufficient to attain power for particular purposes.
This means that from the beginning, ontology is intimately related to the question of being for a particular purpose. This means that so-called “flat” ontologies are not useful in the fictional context. This is why Aristotle takes such time with the question of being and which aspects of the nature of being come into play and why. One can also get into the large question of το δα τι. However, none of this abstruse study brings us closer to what is ontology in fiction. Because action is not concerned with the being-qua-being bought in how influencing the actions of a particular set of characters.
This is something which Cagle and I at least partially agree with: “However, I’d argue that this view of ontology by application definition is not only getting somewhat hoary but that it also fails to take into account how ontologies have changed over time.” I would agree that ontology changes over time because not only does being change but the people perceiving being change. Therefore the ontology of, for example, Camus, is not relevant entirely because the conditions and circumstances of Camus’s life are not those of the present. This does not mean that Camus is relevant, but the topics that plagued him throughout his very short life have subtly altered and require a new sense of how to approach philosophy.
I bring up Camus specifically because he too was interested in the various kinds of philosophy and metaphysics about fiction. I will admit that I deeply admire can lose thoughts on the matter and his works especially L'Étranger and La Peste in style and substance. But as with other things I focus on what is different now. one of the areas is the quotation and referential background in which we now live. One part of this is because of the Internet, instead of watching movies, the way our grandparents or great-grandparents did, and instead of seeing movies on our television set on VCRs or DVDs, we could capture almost any movie for viewing that we wanted to. This is very different from Camus’s reality where one has to remember that’s an important movie because one does not see the movie that often. Whereas now a person could watch Casablanca in a month more times than a cinephile could when the film was released in 1941. Only the most devoted fans at the time were as conversant as the average person is today.
This changes our understanding of quotations and references because we can rapidly discover quotations and references by simply looking them up on the Internet. This is neither good nor bad it simply is. But it also means that we demand a higher sense of ontology. This means that Cagle uses the definition that “A good working definition of an ontology can be thought of as follows: an ontology is a set of schemas that collectively establish the shape of the data held within a named graph.” The problem is that the meaning of the graph also means the time. That the named graph upholds. This is not that unusual considering for example the changes in the Mandelbrot set from the first vision until the latest vision which we can dive ever deeper into. So I would suggest that the change that has value to the named graph needs to be inserted into the graph itself. Because we can update the graph that means that be updated version needs to be named as an updated version from a previous version.
This means that any ontology needs to be updated as the ontology is more described by its graph.
Cagle uses TR Gruber as part of his description, and for those people who do not know Gruber’s work his main achievement is with Siri which was acquired by Apple. Whether this is good or bad will depend on who you talk to. But Gruber is interested in making intelligent networks respond to human direction. Which would be a good thing in most people’s opinion.
To use ontology effectively in connection one must show how a particular character changes as they understand a particular ontology, whether for good or evil. if you want to show for example Marxism as a fallen ontology, or a successful one, you must move the character through the levels of Marxism and show their interaction with it.
So, to summarize: ontology is a general metaphysical concept, that involves taking notions about what an ontology stands for for a group of people. Cagle feels that a graph is the best way of representing ontology. I would like to respectfully disagree that a person who is not familiar with the scope of an ontology needs to be bootstrapped and that bootstrapping needs to be represented in the ontology. That is the recursive nature of an ontology must be represented in the ontology itself and shown by action.