Ontology and Emptiness
12 Nov 2026 - 12 Nov 2026
- Prompted by a quote from Emptiness and Omnipresence
all names are abstractions. That's the whole Emptiness argument. No name refers to a single, unambiguous, decisively determinate entitity. p44
- Ontology, particularly the hardcode BFO objectivist type espoused by Barry Smith, like to pretend otherwise. I'm definitely more in the emptiness camp (see Politics and Pragmatism in Scientific Ontology Construction) but for my sins have agreed to work on a big ontology project. Help me resolve my contradictions.
- Ask Claude
- This is a genuinely rich tension, and you're not alone in feeling it. Let me lay it out clearly, then offer some practical and philosophical tools for living with the contradiction productively.
The Core Tension
- BFO's position:
- Ontologies developed for scientific purposes should be understood as having as their subject matter not concepts, but rather the universals and particulars which exist in reality and are captured in scientific laws.
- Smith's "fundamental principle" is that the way to ensure consistency of ontologies over time is to view ontologies as representations of the reality that is described by science. This is the fundamental principle of ontological realism.
- In this view, universals are invariants in reality, and bad ontologies are those whose general terms lack the relation to corresponding universals in reality.
- The emptiness counter-position:
- Śūnyatā claims that nothing possesses essential, enduring identity because everything is interconnected in a chain of co-becoming and in a state of constant flux.
- More precisely, according to the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness, objects are devoid of essence or "intrinsic properties," but are interdependent by virtue of their relations to other objects.
- The philosophical implication for language is exactly what your quote points to:
- things have an identity through language, and through language do they "exist" or stand apart.
- This maps directly onto the realism/nominalism divide in Western philosophy:
- Platonic realism asserts that universals have objective existence, while conceptualism maintains that universals exist only in the mind, and nominalism denies their existence altogether.
Three Ways to Resolve (or Dissolve) the Contradiction
1. BFO's realism is weaker than it sounds — take Smith's own escape hatch
- Smith and Ceusters actually make a move that partially concedes your point:
- because ontological realism is a methodology, and not a doctrine, it stands in no logical relation to any of the metaphysical doctrines
- (nominalism, conceptualism, etc.). In other words, you can treat terms as if they refer to real universals as a methodological discipline without committing to the strong metaphysical claim that those universals are mind-independently "out there." This is a pragmatist reading of BFO — use the realist framework as a regulative ideal for building better, more consistent ontologies, not as a metaphysical creed.
- Furthermore, each scientific theory as it exists at any given stage will likely be marked by (as yet unidentified) terminologically relevant errors, and these errors will accordingly be carried over into the corresponding ontology — hence, we cannot embrace any simple "representational assumption" between terms in reference ontologies and types or universals in reality.
- Even Smith acknowledges the ontology is always provisional.
2. Nāgārjuna's warning: don't reify emptiness either
- The emptiness position has its own self-correcting safeguard:
- Nāgārjuna warns against a reification of emptiness.
- And crucially, emptiness is understood as the absence of essences — but emptiness is not the essence of existence; emptiness is also empty.
- This matters for your situation. The emptiness view doesn't say "nothing can be named or categorized usefully" — it says no name exhausts or determines its referent. That's compatible with building a working ontology. The mistake would be to treat your ontology's categories as carving reality at its "real" joints — but you can build it as a pragmatic instrument without that commitment. You're not asserting that your ontology's terms refer to essential natures; you're asserting they're useful handles on a flux of dependent-origination.
3. The two-truths doctrine as your operating framework
- The Buddhist doctrine of two truths is the most useful philosophical scaffold here:
- the distinction between things and emptiness is an expression of the doctrine of the "two truths" which became central to Buddhist philosophy through Nāgārjuna's explication of śūnyatā.
- **Conventional truth (saṃvṛtisatya):** Categories, names, and ontologies are conventionally real and pragmatically necessary. Your ontology project lives here.
- **Ultimate truth (paramārthasatya):** No category possesses inherent, fixed existence. Your philosophical commitments live here.
- The contradiction only bites if you collapse the two levels. You can rigorously build a BFO-conformant ontology at the conventional level while holding, at the philosophical level, that its categories are instrumental constructs rather than reality's true seams. This is not hypocrisy — it's exactly the two-truths move.
Practical Upshot for Your Ontology Project
BFO demand Emptiness-aware response Terms must refer to real universals Treat universals as stable regularities useful for science, not metaphysical absolutes Ontology should represent reality Ontology represents our best current scientific model of reality — always revisable Is_a hierarchies carve real joints Hierarchies are the most useful cuts we can make for data integration purposes Eliminate vague or ambiguous terms Acknowledge residual vagueness as irreducible; document it rather than pretending it's resolved
- The sharpest version of your position:
- existence cannot be fully defined because any definition involves exclusion; language inevitably fails in expressing existence because existence always transcends language; ontology is not a static entity, but a dynamic process.
- You can hold that view privately while building an ontology that is as good as possible given that constraint — which is, in fact, all BFO's methodology actually requires in practice, whatever Smith's metaphysical rhetoric claims.
- The contradiction isn't between building ontologies and believing in emptiness. It's between believing your ontology is finished or correct and believing in emptiness. The latter you should never believe anyway.