Talk:Ontology

message: It seems to mostly restate stuff from the previous section, the individual terms are important but it seems like the article would flow better with all of it in one section, yay or nay? Orchastrattor (talk) 16:32, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Hello  and thanks for bring up this issue. Correct me if I'm wrong but I can't find most of the claims in the section "Types of ontologies" in the section "Overview". The overview section provides an overview of many of the different concepts used by ontologists. The types section explains what ontological theories there are. Some theories employ the concepts explained earlier but do not just repeat their definition. Another factor would be that both sections are already quite long. so merging them into one even longer section might not be a good idea Phlsph7 (talk) 08:31, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Some of the "types" are mentioned by name, like categoricalism or bundle theories. It's redundant in the sense that splitting them up creates this effect where reading through section by section it brings up all of the basic concepts for one field of ontology or another under "overview", then moves on to different field, only to have to bring it up again for the "types" a section later. Merging could actually make the overall length shorter by working the actual discourse and history into the main topics. Orchastrattor (talk) 21:51, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: If you are concerned about redundancy, I think the better approach would be to make some changes the other way round. For example, you could take the short passage on bundle theory in the subsection "Properties and relations" and use it to expand the subsection "Constituent ontologies vs blob theories". I'm not sure that there are other cases like this. As I see it, categoricalism is a theory of the nature of properties rather than a full-blown ontology. I would suggest to keep it in the subsection "Properties and relations". Phlsph7 (talk) 08:43, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Types of theories" redundant? 

message: I was thinking about implementing changes to this article with the hope of moving it in the direction of GA status. The article has 6 unreferenced paragraphs and the following maintenance tags: 1x More citations needed, 1x Cleanup, 1x page needed, 6x citation needed. I think it needs more information on various topics that are either not discussed or only in passing. The overview section should have a subsection on the concept of being itself, including the contrast with non-being. The different branches of ontology should also be explained somewhere, like applied ontology, formal ontology, social ontology, and metaontology. The discussion of different ontological theories in the section "Types of ontologies" should probably be expanded to include ontological deflationism, monism vs dualism, materialism vs idealism, platonism vs nominalism, en- vs perdurantism, and modal realism.
There have been various ontological turns in different fields that should be mentioned somewhere, like science and technology studies, geography, and sociology. The methods of ontologists should also be discussed somewhere, not just philosophical methods but also ontological engineering in computer/information science. Other topics to be considered include the connections between ontology and logic, theology, and the natural sciences.
The article is already long as it is so these new topics can't be explained in much detail and some of the current contents would need to be shortened by summarizing. This pertains specifically to the section "Other ontological topics", which contains an assorted collection of subsections, many of which focus on minor topics. The history section is quite long; it could be split into its own article "History of ontology" while retaining a shorter summary here.
Various smaller adjustments are needed but they can be addressed later since the ones mentioned so far will already involve a lot of work to implement. I was hoping to get some feedback on these ideas and possibly other suggestions. I still have to do some research to work out the details. After that, I would start implementing them one at a time but it will probably take a while to address all the points. Phlsph7 (talk) 11:55, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Changes to the article