I've been writing boundaries for various ontologies…

[notes on boundaries]

I've been writing boundaries for various ontologies…

Looking at this sentence makes it seem very abstract. If I add that this writing was stuff for work, one may begin to think it is more jargon of a trade than dilettante scholarship, or perhaps, a sign of revolutionary fervour.

As trade jargon, one may think it has something to do with computer software, some object-orientated programming, while possibly referring less to coding in scripting languages wherein 'ontologies' are more sets of functins and their classes: already.

If I move back to the word ‘boundaries’ instead of ontologies, it may mean I am writing about properties, either real estate boundaries, or possibly, philosophical categories and where they end, or are bounded, and so bind our minds as they/we predicate the objects of experience or thought.

Useful categories like truth.

What I have actually been doing at work is somewhere in between.

So I am creating a creative process, much to my not-delight, which involves creating boundaries for people who do not really have them, not intuitively. Or where in some intersubjective aggregate we get confused by the variety of life, we do not quite meet in the middle, but pull away to strange attractors, either of aggregated iterated bias, or assumptions of interpretation when we are feeling quite open-minded. I.E. people think through institutional classifications, more than they express an ideology with their thinking. A through/with distinction?

Trouble is one could express this with the inverse use of prepositions: I.E. people think with institutional classifications, more than they express an ideology through their thinking.

with/through hits at a distinction ‘without’ being able to think it through (clearly).

Which do you prefer?

1. people think through institutional classifications, more than they express an ideology with their thinking

2. people think with institutional classifications, more than they express an ideology through their thinking.

What way do you prefer to think? With? Through? Or?

Given we do not have very readily agreed conventions (institutions) and the readily argued ideologies (other people’s unconscious ideology) do not help us get it together, nor get it on.

Now with words, generally, I am more of a use person than a definition person when it comes to meanings. This is the traditional Anglophone world way of doing things (insitutionally) and we have descriptive dictionaries, not prescriptive commandments as dictated by some gang of grammarians selected by the French king’s mistress.

So when I start using words in new ways, the new ways are the definition, if we get to the end of the process. Computer programming does not work like this so much, even if LLMs produce usable code. (Interesting thought bubble there, hmmm.)

Try starting again?

Ontology refers to a philosophical use of the Indo-European word used to join bits of sentences together (the copula) which comes down in English as ‘to be’, 'you are', 'I am'. Here in ontology, it is from the Greek, but as a 1600s usage, where the genitive singular form of the Greek nouned form of the verb, ὄντος (ontos), is used to refer to 'that which is' or being. Ontos is combined with (-λογία, (-logia 'logical discourse') in a moment of Neo-Latinate neologism. (I hope I got that right.)

An ontology then, if I put into small words, is bunch of words referring to words that are used to say what are objects or subjects, are in or out of belonging, as if reality was as real as our usage betrays, or as reasoned as our defined ontology portrays, AND that an ontology could capture all that by itself, by being hard and fast with the right words, as if it knew what it was doing, because we are the people of the world.

Hmmmh.

Do we know what we are doing? And, how do we find that out?

Apparently, it is guessed/felt/hoped, that with the right ontology that doesn’t matter.

Yeah, right.

_____________________

In the beginning

Why is this verb ‘to be’ used as the copula in many Indo-European languages, dear sky father? What language would we have, what philosophical systems would we have if we used another verb as copula? (And then different words as auxiliary verbs? To have, to should).

Or have no copula at all?

Silly ontologies, silly, is it all fucked?

 

Starts again.

Back to the work stuff… —writing ontologies.

Writing ontologies is not my preference. I think I am an anarchist. I think I am here, and thereabouts here, to re-frame and provoke creative new frames which better the world. I might deliberately cross boundaries, to blur them, or to troll for an actual joke (and the boundaries between these doings/categories are very blurry but are policed by our shared agreeableness (politeness/respect)).

I do not do it to crowd-surf the chaos so I can become another Putin, another Elon Musk.

So I am always shocked by those folks whose boundaries are weak, non-existent, and those who are blithely unaware of them despite their own castlewalls. What is the point of being an anarchist if no one notices you have crossed some boundary?

The shock of non-recognition.

Basically you are not an anarchist if no one notices the boundary you have heroically crossed in order to save the world. Fail.

<Insert tilting at windmills here by AI>

So even I feel the need, as a failed anarchist, where people have very weak boundaries, where the expected behaviour of a system or personality dealing/working in that system, might not happen in a routine enough manner… — to write frameworks rather than to breach them like some white-hatted ontological sapper-hacker.

Fortunately my other failures of identity kick-in here, more poetry-based creativity and I can write boundaries. I can.

I can.

I think I am.

Interestingly the same re-framing skillset is used by both the failed anarchist and the failed poet.

Exactly.

Re-starts.

I really do not like the word ontologies and their object-orientated methodologies, and I object to that whole objecty way of doingthings, it’s a mistake of some kind, but you know, people… but you know, what-people-know-already is what they already know, so, I agreeable work within what is practically available in peoples’ minds.

If I can guess what that is. Surprises abound.

People.

Things.

People and things they think are objects, but are they? Really?

But enough of that dismissal of ontological work — and people's’ animal recursive tooling-up natures— this is about boundaries, and the territories we roam.

As animals.

Begins again - the spur for this post…

Recently a meme passed me by on a social media platform. The basic gist was that there was a gendered typology (that is the least gendered way to say it), where one gender goes to therapy to learn how to set boundaries, and the binary-gender goes to learn how to respect them.

I'll let you work out who does what, and how exceptions to this binary system are generalised out to create a meme about boundaries, while re-inscribing the process that creates them, in a notice of them… —way messy.

Let’s just say if I did the same gendering thing invertedly, I would get in trouble. I am not anarchist enough now to do that.

Even if it was supportive on inclusiveness, it may not be read that way because of… — the framework, the perspective, the— wait-for-it— gendered Point of View ontology/ies one is trying to overcome, and re-frame. But is/am thwarted by the reality of someone’s lived experience which has to be honoured, in the world if no where else.

Gendering is a way of rendering down the world with noun classses derived from social categories. So ontologies are weird, but useful on occasion when not dressed up in drag on special occasions.

Useful to who though?

What did you say? You were dragged through the mud? It didn’t stick?

______________

Sky father! Why did you let those proto-indo-european teenage girls innovate with a genitive form of a plural noun, to form a noun-class we inherited as feminine, which resulted in neuter and then masculine noun-class genders, why did you with/through us such a typology!!

What do you mean you don’t exist.

Bastard.

(Yes, typologies are a type of ontology so we haven’t moved on yet… but I tried by using a different word.)

Loki, what do you mean it’s all a myth?

In the beginning all typologies are typos.

Starts again.

I've been writing boundaries for various typologies…

—illustrating ideas of how to decide whether or not to include some item/resource/material X, or not, into a collection, or not, and if no collection is appropriate, whether one should include it by making a completely new collection/category/group, and so, how to do that from before the the beginning.

Also, considering, how agreed values provide the discipline of forming the new category/collection/topic/theme, of in-forming but not de-forming the whole project.

Ontologies/typologies are informed by values/frameworks, and if they are not recognised weirdness can result where peeps mistake the ontologies for the values (e.g. gender).

Or, also consider: show, at least, a preference for structure, or types of structure or routines, which then blind us, and the preference (now binding us) is seen as the structure, and a changes to the structure are perceived to be a threat.

DANGER<DANGER! The boundary is confused with the contents!!! Hold fast to… —?

Here values are confused with the outcomes of practical choices.

Such that they cannot be discussed, only identified with, such that then they cannot be agreed through, so they go on about it, having a bit of a thing, because questions are not allowed about…

DANGER>DANGER!

This is bad worlding, and often done in fear of competing categories.

Much later reflections after all the beginnings were done and dusted

What was interesting to me in this process, as a contra, was not just how accurate or inaccurate the typology “is” to real life, nor how it could be bettered, or re-built so we can world better, but why boundaries are important as creative constraints that produce useful discipline of routine, i.e. that world (verb); that produce nurturing world-building contexts, (in a way that a gendered meme does not, the way a universal dominant gendered meme does not).

When more than mean survival is possible. When we have modern complex economies. Like now, when we have the time and resources to actually think about things.

Ontologies are not necessarily bad. They are just a tool in our recursive toolkit. We just make them badly at times, and use them worse, often as definitions and not prayers.

The end of the beginnings.

Constraints are disciplines that maintain skills and produce structures (including ontologies but not bound to them).

Some constraints are values we discuss and agree to because we are agreeable and wish to build a world for our children.

Questions are constraints.

 

Originally posted at substack.com