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Fig. 3.1: Ontology

In the modern history of philosophy, there have been two main ways to frame the structuring of meaning. One is “idealism,” or the notion expressed by René Descartes,^§MS3.1.2g that we make sense of the world by imposing human patterns of thought, or ideas. The other is “materialism,” or the idea expressed by John Locke,^§MS1.3a that the world has intrinsic structures of meaning that our minds acquire through experience. This is a handy stereotypical distinction, though it is one that is hardly fair to Descartes and Locke, each of whose positions is more smartly balanced.

We want to argue that the material of the world and the ideal of our sense-making are never separate, as the stereotypers would for simplicity’s sake want us to think. Call this a materialism if you will, because all sense-making is in, of, and through the material world. Or call it an idealism, because the material world is figured in our sense-making. We want to call this play of the material and the ideal “ontology,” not only philosophically but also because we encounter this word in the practices of digital meaning, and this is what we will have it mean there too.^§MS3.1

For there is more to the material than we have so far been able to experience – hence the possibility to discover, not only things that have hitherto been outside of our experience, but also things that may have been before our very eyes that we have not yet come to notice, and which with attentional effort we may still notice. And there is more to the ideal than what we have until now encountered in the real – actual possibilities that can be achieved humanly and in nature, as well as ideas that may prove practically impossible or wildly fictional. The starting point for such ideas many be the actual, but also ideas that may exceed the actual, for a while at least.

Capturing both the material and the ideal, we are going to parse the processes of ontology – the play of material and ideal – in the notion of design.^§MS0.4.1 Design is morphology, the identifiable structures of things. These are meanings-in the material, structures inherent in the actual. Design is also agency, or the scope for action which may exceed the hitherto-existing actual, in small or large ways. These are meanings-for, realizing the ideal.

When in this book we seem to tend towards materialism, it is because all sense-making is embedded in nature, society, and history, and its truths are discoverable. We are creatures of these determinations. And when we seem to tend towards idealism, it is because we are creatures who can by our actions determine, going beyond the actual to design the imaginable and create the new.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 271–272. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Ontology §MS3.1