Ontology Is Overrated – Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)

I work with someone who is obsessed with ontology, and it can be exhausting to discuss naming schemes, categories, etc at length. I do think there is a place for it, and having also lived in worlds where there was no appreciable consideration for how things are named and categorized and organized, I appreciate that he cares as much as he does.

I mostly rubber duck and let him build castles in the sky which we'll probably never reach, or which will be overcome by events, but it's not the worst way for someone to spend their time. I'm not sure it's always productive, but I don't think it's harmful.

I've finally come around to this way of thinking for two reasons. 1. Our concepts seem to overlap too much to ever explicitly lay them all out like a periodic table. 2. Our concepts seem to be too situationally dependent to ever be defined in a concrete way.

Explicit ontology construction is overused and implicit ontology construction is under-recognized.

What made ontology click for me was that OOP is explicit ontology construction. Carving the world into similar types of things so we can use words to talk about referants is implicit ontology construction. The linguistic world is not isomorphic to the physical world but it has enough utility that we find it useful to confuse the map and territory.

This confusion is one of the greatest sources of human conflict.