Clay is confused

Clay Shirky made his point by providing certain observable facts in a critical-theoretic approach in his speech on ontology, but he is conceptually confused.

First, Clay is confusing three very important branches of philosophy in their practical considerations: epistemology, metaphysics, and semantics. If one assumes an epistemological approach, one is probably trying to understand (gain knowledge) from the world. That is, to make sense of the world you look up to epistemology. On the other hand, ontology (which may be viewed as a subtype of metaphysics — the branch dealing with the nature of being) is concerned with how the world is regardless of how we attempt to understand it (Easterbrook et al.). Moreover, semantics is the branch that deals with the meaning of concepts or entities. That’s not the objective of ontology. In fact, a subtle distinction between the two is evinced once one apprehends Berners-Lee’s Semantic Web paradigm. Thus, I do not see why Clay is confused about the implications of ontology when it comes to human context. After all, an ontology is domain-dependent and could, at least in principle, extend to conceptualizing the largest of the domains (e.g. the WWW).

Second, Clay is confusing the inherent benefit of the existence or development of an ontology with the way an ontology is employed by some application for some predetermined goal. Both Yahoo and Google, for instance, designed ontologies with specific applications in mind. Yahoo intended to digitize physical conceptualizations of taxonomical hierarchies, whereas Google used its search algorithms in conjunction with its ontology(ies) to mine relevant knowledge. Clay needs to recall that ontology development is an iterative process, such as when adding new class instances on, say, the Periodic Table.

Third, Clay is confusing broad, general-purpose ontologies (such as those modelling web knowledge) with domain-specific ontologies (such as those related to, say, wine in this nicely written ontology development guide: Noy and McGuinness’s guide to creating your first ontology).

Fourth, no matter how you view categorization (discrete or stochastic), there cannot be such a property as ontological completeness because the ontological dictionary shall almost always remain incomplete, as Tom Gruber wittingly points out in his concise definition of ontological commitment, which “guarantees consistency, but not completeness with respect to queries or assertions” included in the ontological dictionary.

True, human context is essential. In that sense, when we assume the task of building an ontology where the domain of discourse is to reflect human knowledge, then the developers shall be the humans, who shall be developing an ontology for some specific application in mind (say, searching in, say, Google).

So, Clay, be more accepting of our endeavours to expand the philosophical circle of knowledge while simultaneously humanizing such philosophies…