Ontological status

What are the objections to these ideas The equivalence between students ideas and scientific conceptions had often been doubted. The main argument of many authors has been that both sides are incommensurable. Students conceptions with limited empirical foundation, often ad hoc formulated or post hoc reconstmcted by researchers, have a completely different ontological status to empirically based ideas that are carefully formulated and sharpened by debate among scientific peers. Gault (1991) sketches some cmcial differences as follows ... 

Models are broadly distinguished on the one hand into material or physical or concrete, and on the other hand into abstract or conceptual or symbolic. Symbolic models include mathematical formulas and equations. Gilbert et al. (42) classified models according to their ontological status as follows mental, expressed, consensus, scientific, historical, and hybrid. Consensus, scientific, and historical models specifically developed for education are distinguished into teaching, curricular, and models of pedagogy. 

The uncertainty relations have played a central role since the field of quantum mechanics has been created. Prior to the existence of this theory, experimentalist knew, from their work, that every concrete measurement would necessarily carry an associated error. Yet, it was generally believed that this error was of no fundamental nature, and that one could, in principle, approach the true value by filtering out from a huge amount of measurements. Errors were part of the experimental process. With the advent of quantum physics, the error of measurements assumes a new, ontological status, rooted in the very heart of the theory. The theory itself would be built on this unavoidable error process. 

Hence, there is a sense in which prime matter is particular and a sense in which it is not. And just as in the case with bronze, it is in no way problematic to refuse to grant ontological status to prime matter in so far as it is being referred to apart from those conditions that make its existence possible. 

A problem, however, remains. For, we are admitting that prime matter in sense 1 has some sort of ontological status and doesn t this violate its very nature No. Because its particularity is dependent on its being enformed. This follows from the fact that prime matter (as such) is neither universal nor particular, while the prime matter that constitutes a statue is particular. Hence, particularity is not intrinsic to prime matter, and so there is no violation of its naturelessness. 

At this point, it is possible to respond to an objection commonly raised against prime matter. One might press the question what is the ontological status of prime matter Is it, for instance, a particular If not, is it a universal Or is it devoid of ontological characteristics Any answer to these questions, it would seem, is problematic. If it is a particular or universal, it must have some definite ontological nature. But this is at odds with its naturelessness. If, on the other hand, it is... 

G. W. Wheland, Theory of Resonance and Its Application to Organic Chemistry (New York J. Wiley and Sons London Chapman and Hall, 1944). The Pauling-Wheland controversy on the ontological status of resonance is described in the contribution of K. Gavroglu and A. Simoes in this volume. 

In this paper we discuss a number of issues which manifest the theoretical particularity of quantum chemistry and which are usually not discussed in an explicit manner either in the historical or in the philosophical studies related to quantum chemistry. We shall focus on five issues the re-thinking of the problem of reductionism, the discourse of quantum chemistry as a confluence of the traditions of physics, chemistry, and mathematics, the role of textbooks in consolidating this discourse, the ontological status of resonance, and the more general problem of the status of the chemical bond. Finally, we shall briefly discuss the impact of large scale computing. 

Pauling s resonance theory raised questions as to the ontological status of theoretical entities very similar to the problematique associated with discussions about scientific realism. Differences in the assessment of the methodological and ontological status of resonance were the object of a dispute between Pauling and Wheland, who worked towards the extension of resonance theory to organic... 

The correspondence theory of truth in the stipulated sense of the previous chapter is incompatible with this account on two counts. The correspondence theory in the stipulated sense is a Tarskian theory with reference understood as a non-epistemic relation to entities that are mind-independent in the sense of (MR1). The present account considers reference an epistemic relation, since it hinges on justification conditions, which are clearly epistemic. It also fits badly with the idea that the entities words refer to are ontologically independent of the human mind. The disagreement concerns both the nature of the reference relation but also one of the relata. This latter point may be less clear, since the three-step recipe does not say anything about the ontological status of the entities we refer to. So why does it naturally tie in with (IR1) rather than with (MR1) ... 

The ontological status of linguistic entities was a prime concern of linguistics in the middle part of the 20th century, but surprisingly has not been the subject of more recent work. Good references that discuss the nature of words, sentences, phonemes and so on include Lyons [290] and Bloomfield [57]. Tokenisation in general does not receive much attention in the literature as it is always assumed to be a relatively minor (and simple) task. 

The ontological status of linguistic entities was a prime concern of linguistics in the middle part of the twentieth century, but surprisingly has not been the subject of more... 

In spite of the considerable virtues of Strevens account of scientific explanation, this chapter makes the case that it fails to adequately capture the nature and function of explanatory idealization in chemistry. Explanatory idealization in chemistry is often a matter of distorting explanatorily relevant causal factors - the difference-makers themselves. Strevens commitment to an ontological conception of causal explanation rules out the idealization of difference-makers because they undermine the causal entailment of the target phenomenon. And in an ontological mode of explanation, it is difficult to see how idealized models in chemistry could perform a legitimate causal-explanatory function. For example, the ontological status of atomic and molecular orbitals is vexed to say the least and therefore appear to be poor candidates for causal-difference-makers in Strevens sense. 

By contrast, species (or taxa in general) have been considered individuals on account of their spatio-temporal restrictedness. Individual in that sense can mean a logical or an ontological status or both. The question relevant for empirical sciences is whether ontology informs scientific theory in normative ways (Popper, 1979 72-73) or whether ontology flows from scientific theory. 

Aven, T, Reim, O. and Rosa, E. 2011. The ontological status of the concept of risk. 

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