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Metaontology

What are we even talking about?

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metaontology-01 Metaontology: The Elephant in the Room. Exploring how different frameworks define the nature of reality. Courtesy of Nano Banana.

Have you ever found yourself in a debate that felt like it was happening in two different languages?[1] Perhaps it was about God, consciousness, or whether that thing in your fridge is still 'food'. You weren't just disagreeing on the answer; you were disagreeing on the rules for finding an answer. This is the hidden architecture of every profound debate and it’s the domain of a fascinating field called metaontology. Before we can seriously ask 'What exists?' we must first ask, 'What does it mean to ask: what exists'? This second-order question isn't about building an inventory of the universe. It's about examining the tools, assumptions, and very rulebook we use to conduct that inventory. It questions the rules of ontological enquiry itself.

In a world saturated with competing frameworks—scientific, religious, social—understanding how these frameworks make their claims is more critical than ever. Metaontology provides the intellectual toolkit for this analysis, allowing us to move beyond shouting matches and into genuine understanding. It is not a theory of 'what is', but a theory of what we are doing when we develop theories of 'what is'.[2]

The Architects of Reality: A Tour of Classical Positions

Our journey begins not with a revolutionary, but with a systematizer. Aristotle's Metaphysics is a first-order ontology, a magnificent categorization of types of beings. But implicitly, he established the metaontological rules of the game. His method of inquiring into being qua being—being as such—and his unwavering reliance on logical principles like the law of non-contradiction set a powerful template. For Aristotle, ontology wasn't a matter of opinion; it was a systematic, reasoned investigation into the fundamental structures of reality. He gave us the first rulebook, even if he was mostly focused on playing the game.

If this seems like a solid foundation, prepare for an earthquake. The next great shift came from Immanuel Kant, who initiated a decisive metaontological turn. Kant argued that we can never have direct knowledge of things-as-they-are-in-themselves (noumena). Instead, our entire conception of being is constrained by the very structure of our minds, limited to the realm of possible experience (phenomena). This was his 'Copernican revolution': instead of our knowledge conforming to objects, objects must conform to our faculties of knowledge.

This is the conceptual leap that changes everything. Kant made ontology dependent on epistemology. The primary metaontological question was no longer 'What is being'? but 'What are the conditions for the possibility of experiencing being'? He moved the debate from the outer universe to the inner architecture of human understanding.

The 20th century sharpened this debate into a razor's edge. Rudolf Carnap, in his seminal Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology, made the most forceful deflationary claim.[3] He distinguished between internal questions—questions about existence within a chosen linguistic framework, which are meaningful and answerable by that framework's rules—and external questions—questions about the reality of the framework itself, which he dismissed as practically meaningless 'pseudo-questions'.[4]

Think of it not as discovering a world, but as choosing a language. For Carnap, asking 'Do numbers really exist'? is like asking if a screwdriver is really good outside of the context of a task. It's empty. Ontology, for Carnap, is merely the pragmatic choice of a linguistic framework for a particular purpose. It’s a tool, not a truth.

But what if the tool shapes the truth we can find? This was the thrust of W.V.O. Quine and his powerful rebuttal in On What There Is.[5] Quine argued there is no magic circle separating internal and external questions; all theories, whether scientific or philosophical, carry ontological commitments. We can't just choose a framework without making a claim about what exists. His famous metaontological criterion was: 'To be is to be the value of a bound variable'.[6] In plainer language: what our best, most robust scientific theories say exists, does exist. This was a return to 'serious', non-trivial ontology, firmly grounded in the web of science.

Quine's hegemony didn't end the debate; it defined the modern battlefield. The post-Quinean landscape is a plurality of methods:

The Modern Flashpoints: Where the Debate Lives Today

The contemporary conversation crackles with energy around several core tensions. First, the Quantification Question: Is Quine's criterion the only way to read ontological commitment? Perhaps there are more nuanced ways to discern what a theory is truly committed to. Second, the problem of Fundamentality & Grounding: If we accept there is a fundamental level of reality, how do we define it? Is 'grounding' a legitimate, primitive relation or a vague metaphor?

Strip away the technicalities and this is a story about authority. This leads directly to the Realism vs. Anti-Realism debate: Is metaontology itself a descriptive project (discovering the pre-existing rules of ontological inquiry) or a prescriptive one (inventing them)? Is there one true metaontology, or are we merely choosing a philosophical aesthetic? This forces us to ask about the Role of Conceptual Analysis: Can examining our concepts (like 'object') tell us about the world, or only about the contours of our own minds? Finally, Naturalism's Domain looms large: Must metaontology be 'naturalized' and subordinated to science, or can it operate with its own distinct methods, like intuition and pure logical analysis?

A New Tool for the Toolkit: The CRUP Ontological Model Assessment Framework (CRUP-OMAF)

Into this rich and fractious debate, we can introduce an Ontological Model Assessment Framework (OMAF) as a pragmatic synthesizer. The Completeness, Robustness, Usefulness, Potential i.e. CRUP-OMAF is not another first-order ontology claiming to list what exists. It is a specific meta-framework—a rubric for evaluating the completeness of any proposed ontological model on a range of dimensions.[10] For the CRUP-OMAF those dimensions are contextualised as: completeness, robustness, pragmatic usefulness and transformative potential.[11]

CRUP-OMAF moves beyond the singular focus of the giants. It doesn't force a choice between Quine's scientific seriousness and Carnap's pragmatic flexibility. Instead, it proposes a multi-dimensional assessment across four axes:

By incorporating Quinean and Carnapian concerns within a broader scheme, CRUP-OMAF offers one way to bridge the divide, offering an holistic way to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of any ontological system without getting stuck in a century-old stalemate.

Convergence and Divergence: The State of the Art

Despite their fierce disagreements, all metaontological positions are united by a single, noble project: to critically examine the methods and status of ontological claims. From Kant to Carnap to Quine to CRUP-OMAF, the goal is always to impose rigor and clarity on our accounts of being.

Their divergences, however, are profound. They split on the Scope of Inquiry: Carnap and the easy ontologists seek to constrict ontology, dismissing many questions as nonsensical. Quine, Sider and frameworks like CRUP-OMAF seek to expand it, providing tools to answer more questions seriously. They also prioritize different Virtues: Quineans prioritize Axis II (Robustness via science), Carnapians prioritize Axis III (Pragmatic Usefulness), and CRUP OMAF explicitly adds Axis IV (Transformative Potential) as a core criterion for success.

This isn't a perfect comparison, as it simplifies nuanced positions, but it illustrates the key difference: The classical metaontologists were primarily prescribing a method for doing ontology (Do it this way!). CRUP-OMAF, by contrast, operates at a meta-meta level, offering a neutral(ish) evaluation framework for assessing the outcomes of any method. It’s the difference between a coach demanding everyone play the same sport and a sports analyst with a rubric to evaluate any game.

The Takeaway: Why This Matters to You

So, what have we learned? First, that metaontology is the essential, often invisible, foundation. You cannot do ontology—you cannot make a claim about what exists—without implicitly adopting a metaontology. You are always subject to a set of rules, whether you've read them or not.

The central historical drama is the tug-of-war between deflationary views (like Carnap's) that see ontology as a matter of linguistic or pragmatic choice and inflationary views (like Quine's) that see it as a substantive, scientific inquiry into the furniture of the universe.

Today, the field is richer than the classic Quine-Carnap dichotomy suggests, exploring the very limits and tools of inquiry itself. CRUP-OMAF is one framework that represents a pragmatic synthesis, arguing that we shouldn't seek one single metaontological rule but instead use a multi-criteria approach to evaluate models on their completeness, robustness, usefulness and yes, even their potential to transform—warrant.

The ultimate takeaway is that engaging with metaontology is not a passive academic exercise. It is an active, clarifying process of examining the rules we use to construct our understanding of reality.[12] It is the philosophy behind the philosophy, making it one of the most vital and, frankly, self-aware areas of human thought. It empowers you to not just ask what exists, but to understand the weight of the question itself.[13]

The Gospel of Being cover

The Gospel of Being

by John Mackay

A rigorous yet readable exploration of how existence functions—and how that relates to you.

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Footnotes

  1. This phenomenon of incommensurate frameworks is a recurring theme in intellectual history. Beyond philosophy, the famous debate between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr over quantum mechanics is a prime example. Einstein, arguing from a framework prioritizing local realism ("God does not play dice"), and Bohr, arguing from a framework of complementarity and operational definition, were often talking past each other. Their disagreement was less about the data and more about the fundamental rules for interpreting it—a deeply metaontological conflict. Other classic examples include the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in linguistics, Thomas Kuhn's concept of "paradigm shifts" in science, and the foundational debates between Skinnerian behaviorism and cognitive psychology ↩︎

  2. Lexigraphically, the prefix meta- derives from Greek, meaning 'after' or 'behind'. This is the sense we find in a word like metaphysical i.e. ‘that which originates behind' of something. The grammatical point is that terms like metaphysical or ontology i.e. 'account of being' are formally incomplete-they require an object i.e. ontology of what? Throughout this article the term metaontology is used in its contemporary meaning not its authentic lexigraphical meaning. ↩︎

  3. Carnap, R. (1956). Empiricism, semantics, and ontology. In Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic (2nd ed., pp. 205–221). The University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1950) ↩︎

  4. Ibid. p. 208. ↩︎

  5. Quine, W. V. O. (1948). On what there is. The Review of Metaphysics, 2(5), 21–38. ↩︎

  6. Ibid. p. 32. ↩︎

  7. Thomasson, A. L. (2015). Ontology made easy. Oxford University Press. ↩︎

  8. Sider, T. (2011). Writing the book of the world. Oxford University Press. ↩︎

  9. Fine, K. (2009). The question of ontology. In D. J. Chalmers, D. Manley, & R. Wasserman (Eds.), Metametaphysics: New essays on the foundations of ontology (pp. 157–177). Oxford University Press. ↩︎

  10. See the CRUP-OMAF Case Study: The Conference of Difference as Primative of Existence at https://codeberg.org/johnmackay61/omaf/src/branch/main/docs/case-studies/crup-omaf-cod.md ↩︎

  11. In other words, the CRUP-OMAF is but one of, what could be, many OMAFs in which to plug-in ontological domain models and assess them across nominal dimensions. Over time, both the models and frameworks themselves should reveal their applicability, both ontologically and metaontologically. The rubric scores, whilst not meaningful in and of themselves, are intended to function much like Roland Barthes 'punctum' where that which pricks you gets your attention. It makes you ask: Why does this model fall short on $X$ dimension e.g. can or does the model need improving, is the dimension valid or is it the framework itself? ↩︎

  12. This process of examining the "rules of the game" has profound practical applications. In everyday life, we constantly navigate clashes between different ontological frameworks without calling them that. For instance, consider a debate about a "good life." One person, operating within a hedonic framework, might define it by the presence of pleasure and absence of pain. Another, within a eudaimonic framework (from Aristotle's eudaimonia), might define it by virtue, purpose, and flourishing. They aren't just disagreeing on what makes a life good; they are disagreeing on the fundamental meaning of "good" in this context—a metaontological dispute. Applying metaontological awareness allows us to identify this root conflict, move past talking past each other, and either find a more productive common ground or clearly understand the nature of our disagreement. This same skill is invaluable in mediating workplace conflicts, understanding political rhetoric, or even parsing the terms of service for a new app—it is the art of uncovering the hidden rulebooks that govern our conversations and convictions. ↩︎

  13. Initial drafts of this article were created with the assistence of DeepSeek R1, with records of conversations retained. Any errors or omissions, in published form however, are mine alone. ↩︎