ONTOLOGY

The Nature of What Is Studied

Composed by:

1. FARADINA PRIMARINI NS 1923042001

2. FARIHATUL HASNAH 1923042004
3. REBECCA GATAN 1923042005
4. AKBAR ALI MUSTOFA 1923042015
5. EWO PRIYO SUSANTO 1923042019
6. RINI PUTRI MALINDA 1923042021
7. INDAH RIZQIA PUTRI W 1923042022
8. TRI WIDIOKO 1923042023
9. ESA WIDI SEPTIANA 1923042027
10. GILANGADITTAMA 1923042032

Master Degree of English Education

Teacher Training and Education Faculty
Lampung University
2019
 Table of Contents

I. Introductions
I.1. Background................................................................................3
I.2. Problems....................................................................................4
I.3. Objectives..................................................................................4

II. Discussions
II.1. Metaphysics..............................................................................x
II.2. Assumptions.............................................................................xx
II.3. Probalility.................................................................................xx
II.4. Assumptions in sciences...........................................................xx
II.5. Limitations in sciences.............................................................xx

III. Conclusions......................................................................X

IV. Bibliography....................................................................X
 I. INTRODUCTIONS

1.1. Background

In ancient times the nations in this world assumed that all events in this
worlds were influenced by God, therefore the Godmust be respected and feared
also worshiped. With philosophy, the mindset that always depends on Godis
changed to the mindset that depends on rational thinking. The change from
mythocentric to logocentric mindset has major implications. Nature with all its
symptoms, which have been feared and then approached and even exploited. The
fundamental change is the discovery of natural laws and scientific theories that
explain the changes that occur, both in the universe (macrocosm) and human
nature (microcosm). From macrocosm research emerged astronomy, physics,
chemistry and so on, while from microcosm emerged biological science,
psychology, sociology and etc.

Ontology, the philosophical study of being in general, or of what applies

neutrally to everything that is real. It was called “first philosophy” by Aristotle in
Book IV of his Metaphysics. The Latin term ontologia (“science of being”) was
felicitously invented by the German philosopher Jacob Lorhard (Lorhardus) and
first appeared in his work Ogdoas Scholastica (1st ed.) in 1606.Ontology is the
study of being. It focuses on several related questions:What things exist? What
categories do they belong to? Is there such a thing as objective reality?What does
the verb “to be” mean?

Some of these questions may seem painfully abstract and not very useful, but
they are and always have been enormously important to some philosophers,
especially to those who believe in foundationalism. Ontology is also highly
relevant to religions and spirituality. No matter what your beliefs about
spirituality, they have an ontological dimension. All of the following are
ontological statements:
 Everything is made of atoms and energy
Everything is made of consciousness
You have a soul
You have a mind

I.2. Problems

I.3. Objectives
 II. Discussions

II.1 Metaphysics

It is not easy to say what metaphysics is. Ancient and Medieval philosophers
might have said that metaphysics was, like chemistry or astrology, to be defined by
its subject-matter: metaphysics was the “science” that studied “being as such” or “the
first causes of things” or “things that do not change”. It is no longer possible to
define metaphysics that way, for two reasons. First, a philosopher who denied the
existence of those things that had once been seen as constituting the subject-matter of
metaphysics first causes or unchanging things would now be considered to be
making thereby a metaphysical assertion. Second, there are many philosophical
problems that are now considered to be metaphysical problems (or at least partly
metaphysical problems) that are in no way related to first causes or unchanging
things the problem of free will, for example, or the problem of the mental and the
physical.

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental

nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between
substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality. The word
"metaphysics" comes from two Greek words that, together, literally mean "after or
behind or among [the study of] the natural".Topics of metaphysical investigation
include existence, objects and their properties, space and time, cause and effect, and
possibility.

Metaphysical study is conducted using deduction from that which is known a

priori. Like foundational mathematics (which is sometimes considered a special case
of metaphysics applied to the existence of number), it tries to give a coherent account
of the structure of the world, capable of explaining our everyday and scientific
perception of the world, and being free from contradictions. In mathematics, there
are many different ways to define numbers; similarly in metaphysics there are many
different ways to define objects, properties, concepts, and other entities which are
claimed to make up the world. While metaphysics may, as a special case, study the
entities postulated by fundamental science such as atoms and superstrings, its core
topic is the set of categories such as object, property and causality which those
scientific theories assume. For example: claiming that "electrons have charge" is a
scientific theory; while exploring what it means for electrons to be (or at least, to be
perceived as) "objects", charge to be a "property", and for both to exist in a
topological entity called "space" is the task of metaphysics.

A. The Concept of Metaphysics

The word ‘metaphysics’ is notoriously hard to define. Twentieth-century

coinages like ‘meta-language’ and ‘metaphilosophy’ encourage the impression that
metaphysics is a study that somehow “goes beyond” physics, a study devoted to
matters that transcend the mundane concerns of Newton and Einstein and
Heisenberg. This impression is mistaken. The word ‘metaphysics’ is derived from a
collective title of the fourteen books by Aristotle that we currently think of as making
up Aristotle's Metaphysics. Aristotle himself did not know the word. (He had four
names for the branch of philosophy that is the subject-matter of Metaphysics: ‘first
philosophy’, ‘first science’, ‘wisdom’, and ‘theology’.) At least one hundred years
after Aristotle's death, an editor of his works (in all probability, Andronicus of
Rhodes) titled those fourteen books “Ta meta ta phusika” “the after the physicals” or
“the ones after the physical ones” the “physical ones” being the books contained in
what we now call Aristotle's Physics. The title was probably meant to warn students
of Aristotle's philosophy that they should attempt Metaphysics only after they had
mastered “the physical ones”, the books about nature or the natural world that is to
say, about change, for change is the defining feature of the natural world.

This is the probable meaning of the title because Metaphysics is about things

that do not change. In one place, Aristotle identifies the subject-matter of first
philosophy as “being as such”, and, in another as “first causes”. It is a nice and vexed
question what the connection between these two definitions is. Perhaps this is the
answer: The unchanging first causes have nothing but being in common with the
mutable things they cause. Like us and the objects of our experience they are, and
there the resemblance ceases. (For a detailed and informative recent guide to
Aristotle's Metaphysics, see Politis 2004.)
Should we assume that ‘metaphysics’ is a name for that “science” which is the
subject-matter of Aristotle's Metaphysics? If we assume this, we should be
committed to something in the neighborhood of the following theses:

 The subject-matter of metaphysics is “being as such”

 The subject-matter of metaphysics is the first causes of things

 The subject-matter of metaphysics is that which does not change

Any of these three theses might have been regarded as a defensible statement of
the subject-matter of what was called ‘metaphysics’ until the seventeenth century.
But then, rather suddenly, many topics and problems that Aristotle and the Medievals
would have classified as belonging to physics (the relation of mind and body, for
example, or the freedom of the will, or personal identity across time) began to be
reassigned to metaphysics. One might almost say that in the seventeenth century
metaphysics began to be a catch-all category, a repository of philosophical problems
that could not be otherwise classified as epistemology, logic, ethics or other branches
of philosophy. (It was at about that time that the word ‘ontology’ was invented—to
be a name for the science of being as such, an office that the word ‘metaphysics’
could no longer fill.) The academic rationalists of the post-Leibnizian school were
aware that the word ‘metaphysics’ had come to be used in a more inclusive sense
than it had once been. Christian Wolff attempted to justify this more inclusive sense
of the word by this device: while the subject-matter of metaphysics is being, being
can be investigated either in general or in relation to objects in particular categories.
He distinguished between ‘general metaphysics’ (or ontology), the study of being as
such, and the various branches of ‘special metaphysics’, which study the being of
objects of various special sorts, such as souls and material bodies. (He does not
assign first causes to general metaphysics, however: the study of first causes belongs
to natural theology, a branch of special metaphysics.) It is doubtful whether this
maneuver is anything more than a verbal ploy. In what sense, for example, is the
practitioner of rational psychology (the branch of special metaphysics devoted to the
soul) engaged in a study of being? Do souls have a different sort of being from that
of other objects?—so that in studying the soul one learns not only about its nature
(that is, its properties: rationality, immateriality, immortality, its capacity or lack
thereof to affect the body …), but also about its “mode of being”, and hence learns
something about being? It is certainly not true that all, or even very many, rational
psychologists said anything, qua rational psychologists, that could plausibly be
construed as a contribution to our understanding of being.

Theories of Metaphysics

There are three theories included in metaphysics, the first being idealism. This
idealism assumes that in fact all of this diversity originates from the spirit, something
which is formless and occupies no space.

So the point is that this theory only recognizes the spirit that is in control of material
things, such as a chef, it is not possible to prepare food directly without thinking and
acting what needs to be done. In order to become a human being not only uses the
body or body in the form of the five senses, but also uses a spiritual instrument that
includes reason and mind.

The second is materialism, this theory argues that everything is all just a matter in the
end because in essence everything in this world comes from matter which means
there is no difference between humans and animals or anything else.

The third is dualism, this theory assumes that reality comes from two different things
that cannot be equated, stand alone, but are interrelated. For example, like the brain
and mind are two different things, but the two are interrelated, without the brain it
cannot think because the brain captures signals from the outside and without the
mind the brain cannot work like a motor without gasoline.

B. The Problems of Metaphysics: the “Old” Metaphysics

Being As Such, First Causes, Unchanging Things

If metaphysics now considers a wider range of problems than those studied in

Aristotle's Metaphysics, those original problems continue to belong to its subject-
matter. For instance, the topic of “being as such” (and “existence as such”, if
existence is something other than being) is one of the matters that belong to
metaphysics on any conception of metaphysics. The following theses are all
paradigmatically metaphysical:

 “Being is; not-being is not” [Parmenides];

 “Essence precedes existence” [Avicenna, paraphrased];
 “Existence in reality is greater than existence in the understanding alone” [St
Anselm, paraphrased];
 “Existence is a perfection” [Descartes, paraphrased];
 “Being is a logical, not a real predicate” [Kant, paraphrased];
 “Being is the most barren and abstract of all categories” [Hegel,
paraphrased];
 “Affirmation of existence is in fact nothing but denial of the number zero”
[Frege];
 “Universals do not exist but rather subsist or have being” [Russell,
paraphrased];
 “To be is to be the value of a bound variable” [Quine].

It seems reasonable, moreover, to say that investigations into non-being belong to the
topic “being as such” and thus belong to metaphysics. (This did not seem reasonable
to Meinong, who wished to confine the subject-matter of metaphysics to “the actual”
and who therefore did not regard his Theory of Objects as a metaphysical theory.
According to the conception of metaphysics adopted in this article, however, his
thesis [paraphrased] “Predication is independent of being” is paradigmatically
metaphysical.)

An anti-metaphysician in the contemporary sense is not a philosopher who

denies that there are objects of the sorts that an earlier philosopher might have said
formed the subject-matter of metaphysics (first causes, things that do not change,
universals, substances, …), but rather a philosopher who denies the legitimacy of the
question whether there are objects of those sorts.

The three original topics the nature of being; the first causes of things; things that do
not change remained topics of investigation by metaphysicians after Aristotle.
Another topic occupies an intermediate position between Aristotle and his
successors.
C. Is Metaphysics Possible?

It may also be that there is no internal unity to metaphysics. More strongly,

perhaps there is no such thing as metaphysics or at least nothing that deserves to be
called a science or a study or a discipline. Perhaps, as some philosophers have
proposed, no metaphysical statement or theory is either true or false. Or perhaps, as
others have proposed, metaphysical theories have truth-values, but it is impossible to
find out what they are. At least since the time of Hume, there have been philosophers
who have proposed that metaphysics is “impossible” either because its questions are
meaningless or because they are impossible to answer. The remainder of this entry
will be a discussion of some recent arguments for the impossibility of metaphysics.

McGinn's argument for the conclusion that the human mind is (as a matter of
evolutionary contingency, and not simply because it is “a mind”) incapable of a
satisfactory treatment of a large range of philosophical questions (a range that
includes all metaphysical questions), however, depends on speculative factual theses
about human cognitive capacities that are in principle subject to empirical refutation
and which are at present without significant empirical support. For a different
defense of the weak thesis, see Thomasson 2009.

D. Relationship of Metaphysics and Science

Prior to the modern history of science, scientific questions were addressed as

a part of natural philosophy. Originally, the term "science" (Latin scientia) simply
meant "knowledge". The scientific method, however, transformed natural philosophy
into an empirical activity deriving from experiment, unlike the rest of philosophy. By
the end of the 18th century, it had begun to be called "science" to distinguish it from
other branches of philosophy. Science and philosophy have been considered
separated disciplines ever since. Thereafter, metaphysics denoted philosophical
enquiry of a non-empirical character into the nature of existence.

Metaphysics continues asking "why" where science leaves off. For example,
any theory of fundamental physics is based on some set of axioms, which may
postulate the existence of entities such as atoms, particles, forces, charges, mass, or
fields. Stating such postulates is considered to be the "end" of a science theory.
Metaphysics takes these postulates and explores what they mean as human concepts.
For example, do all theories of physics require the existence of space and time,
objects, and properties? Or can they be expressed using only objects, or only
properties? Do the objects have to retain their identity over time or can they change?
If they change, then are they still the same object? Can theories be reformulated by
converting properties or predicates (such as "red") into entities (such as redness or
redness fields) or processes ('there is some redding happening over there' appears in
some human languages in place of the use of properties). Is the distinction between
objects and properties fundamental to the physical world or to our perception of it?

Much recent work has been devoted to analyzing the role of metaphysics in
scientific theorizing. Alexandre Koyré led this movement, declaring in his book
Metaphysics and Measurement, "It is not by following experiment, but by
outstripping experiment, that the scientific mind makes progress." That metaphysical
propositions can influence scientific theorizing is John Watkins' most lasting
contribution to philosophy. Since 1957 "he showed the ways in which some un-
testable and hence, according to Popperian ideas, non-empirical propositions can
nevertheless be influential in the development of properly testable and hence
scientific theories. These profound results in applied elementary logic...represented
an important corrective to positivist teachings about the meaninglessness of
metaphysics and of normative claims". Imre Lakatos maintained that all scientific
theories have a metaphysical "hard core" essential for the generation of hypotheses
and theoretical assumptions. Thus, according to Lakatos, "scientific changes are
connected with vast cataclysmic metaphysical revolutions."

An example from biology of Lakatos' thesis: David Hull has argued that
changes in the ontological status of the species concept have been central in the
development of biological thought from Aristotle through Cuvier, Lamarck, and
Darwin. Darwin's ignorance of metaphysics made it more difficult for him to respond
to his critics because he could not readily grasp the ways in which their underlying
metaphysical views differed from his own.
 In physics, new metaphysical ideas have arisen in connection with quantum
mechanics, where subatomic particles arguably do not have the same sort of
individuality as the particulars with which philosophy has traditionally been
concerned. Also, adherence to a deterministic metaphysics in the face of the
challenge posed by the quantum-mechanical uncertainty principle led physicists such
as Albert Einstein to propose alternative theories that retained determinism. A.N.
Whitehead is famous for creating a process philosophy metaphysics inspired by
electromagnetism and special relativity.

In chemistry, Gilbert Newton Lewis addressed the nature of motion, arguing

that an electron should not be said to move when it has none of the properties of
motion.Katherine Hawley notes that the metaphysics even of a widely accepted
scientific theory may be challenged if it can be argued that the metaphysical
presuppositions of the theory make no contribution to its predictive success.

E. Relationship of Metaphysics and Language

Probability

A. Language May Have Been Originated from Africa

B. Is Language Restricted to Human Only

A universally accepted definition of language or the criteria for its use does
not exist. This is one of the reasons for the disagreement among scientists about
whether non-human species can use language. Briefly, Language is a system of
communication based upon words and the combination of words into sentences.
Communication by means of language may be referred to as linguistic
communication, the other ways like laughing, smiling, shrieking, and so on are types
of non-linguistic communication. In nature we find numerous kinds of
communication systems, many of which appear to be unique to their possessors, and
one of them is the language of the human species. Basically, the purpose of
communication is the preservation, growth, and development of the species. The
ability to exchange information is shared by all communication systems, and a
number of nonhuman systems share some features of human language. The
fundamental difference between human and non-human communication is that
animals are believed to react instinctively, in a stereotyped and predictable way.
Mostly, human behaviour is under the voluntary control, and human language is
creative and unpredictable. It is generally assumed that only humans have language.

Parts of the problem of differentiating man from the other animals is the
problem of describing how human language differs from any kind of communicative
behaviour carried on by non-human or pre-human species. Until we have done this,
we cannot know how much it means to assert that only man has the power of speech.
In order to contrast human language with animal communication, there is a set of
design feature that all human possess. The seven key properties are: duality of
pattern (the combination of a phonological system and a grammatical system),
productivity (the ability to create and understand new utterances), arbitrariness (when
signs/words do not resemble the things they represent), interchangeability (the ability
to transmit and to receive messages by exchanging roles), specialization (when the
only function of speech is communication and the speaker does not act out his
message), displacement (the ability to refer to the past and to things not present), and
cultural transmission (the ability to teach/learn from other individuals, e.g. by
imitation). Precisely, a kind of language organ within the mind is part of the genetic
make-up of humans. A system which makes it possible from a limited set of rules to
construct an unlimited number of sentences is not found in any other species, and it
is an investigation of this uniqueness that is important and not the likeness between
human language and other communication systems.

On the contrary, most or all non-human species can exchange information,

but none of them are known to have a system of communication with a complexity
that in any way is comparable to language. Primarily, they communicate with non-
linguistic means resembling our smiling, laughing, yelling, clenching of fists, and
raising of eyebrows. Chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutangs can exchange different
kinds of information by emitting different kinds of shrieks, composing their faces in
numerous ways, and moving their hands or arms in different gestures, but they do not
have words and sentences. Meanwhile, the way that parrots and other birds can
imitate human language words is an impressive feat. So, what is really going on
when birds seem to say words? Well, for one thing, and for the most part, talking
birds’ utterances do not mean anything. Bird-owning readers may agree that a bird
might say “hello,” over and over and over, in a way that a person over the age of two
never would, or, say “hello” when someone is leaving instead of arriving. Unlike
when people say words, birds that say words are doing something more like playing
a game. People, again, choose what we want to say and when, as opposed to
producing language inadvertently. When people are hungry, we can choose to tell
this fact to someone, or we can choose to stay quiet about it. When someone arrives,
we are free to greet the person, or ignore the person, and when someone leaves, we
are very unlikely to part ways with a “hello.” These birds are brilliant imitators, but
true human language is generated by choice and intention, not by imitation. Talking
birds also cannot generate new sentences by combining words they have learned, nor
can they segment the words they have learned. The utterances of birds cannot be
broken down into discrete units. Think of a bird who has learned to say “Polly wanna
cracker.” We could ask an English-speaking child to say the same sentence, and then
say, “Now say ‘Polly.’ Now, say ‘want.’ Say ‘cracker,’” with great success, and
without any crackers or Pollys nearby for visual cues. I’m sure you can see how
asking the parrot to do the same would be an exercise in frustration. In addition, we
could ask the child to make the “p” sound, or the “ah” sound in Polly, or the “l”
sound, because human language speakers produce words by combining discrete
sounds.

In any case, without having intensively investigated any form of animal

communication that may resemble human language, e.g. combinations of words or
signs, intonation, and body-language we cannot claim that language is restrcited to
human only.
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