Meta-ontology

Meta-ontology is the study of the field of inquiry known as Ontology. The goal of meta-ontology is to clarify what ontology is about and how to interpret the meaning of ontological claims. Different meta-ontological theories disagree on what the goal of ontology is and whether a given issue or theory lies within the scope of ontology. There is no universal agreement whether meta-ontology is a separate field of inquiry besides ontology or whether it is just one branch of ontology. Meta-ontological realists hold that there are objective answers to the basic questions of ontology. According to the Quinean approach, the goal of ontology is to determine what exists and what doesn't exist. The neo-Aristotelian approach asserts that the goal of ontology is to determine which entities are fundamental and how the non-fundamental entities depend on them. Meta-ontological anti-realists, on the other hand, deny that there are objective answers to the basic questions of ontology. One example of such an approach is Rudolf Carnap's thesis that the truth of existence-claims depends on the framework in which these claims are formulated. The term "meta-ontology" is of recent origin. It was first coined in the francophone world by Alain Badiou, in his work 'Being and Event,' in which he proposes a philosophy of the event conditioned by axiomatic set theory. Its first anglo-american use can be found in the work of Peter van Inwagen, in which he analyzes Willard Van Orman Quine's critique of Rudolf Carnap's metaphysics, where Quine introduced a formal technique for determining the ontological commitments in a comparison of ontologies. Thomas Hofweber, while acknowledging that the use of the term is controversial, suggests that meta-ontology constitutes a separate field of enquiry besides ontology as its metatheory, when understood in a strict sense. But ontology can also be construed more broadly as containing its metatheory. Advocates of the term seek to distinguish 'ontology', which investigates what there is, from 'meta'-ontology, which investigates what we are asking when we ask what there is.