https://www-cambridge-org.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/core/books/making-sense/part-3-structure/901712E84314688FE04A85697A7E6668#A-sec-50" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">1 of ontologies.²¹⁰

So, in the spirit of Uddakala^§MS3.3d and Kant,^§MS3.3e this grammar is another metaontology, drawing on a long tradition in this kind of theorizing. We address, albeit in a different configuration and with different names, the elements of Kant’s categorical system, and other such systems.

However, we depart from Kant (and his confreres Saussure^§MS3d and Chomsky,^§MS3.1.2e also the Vedas of a conventional idealist reading ^§MS3.3d) in two major ways. The first is that to the extent that there is an excess of the ideal over the material, it is only provisional or conjectural – provisional, for instance, when we haven’t yet found a particular elementary particle but our reasoning tells us we may still if we keep looking, or conjectural in the realistic or unrealistic might-have-beens of fiction. Some of the ideal can be dismissed as mystification or lies, real though these may be in their effects on social life. The ideal may be materially discovered (or not), and its material effects observed no matter how disconnected from materiality. Always, we need to have the ideal in play with the material, but the material is the final measure of ideality.

The second difference we have with pure, reducible idealism is that the world of our meaning, the meanings-in natural and human materiality are infinitely complex and so always ramshackle. As we make sense of the world, no matter how much structure we attempt to impose through our meanings-for, we face the constantly changing shape of human experience as a subset of natural history and the volatility of natural history itself. Nor is the structure just in the overall patterns of macro-order, but the infinitely varied patterns of micro-order where no one relation exactly replicates any other.

And so to design. There are big patterns in our available designs of meaning, which we might for instance call “relations,” where “part-of” is different from “kind-of.” But every moment of design, these relations play themselves out in specific configurations that have never quite been meant this way before. No two parts-of are the same, no two kinds-of.

Ontologies do both things, laying things out using the broad patterning techniques for which text is well suited, putting these in endless spatialized array of juxtaposed specificities. And no matter how exhaustive the list, spaces can always be left for “other,” allowing that, though relatively stable and comprehensive in historical practice, the lists are also infinitely extensible. The encounter between the ideal and the material is open-ended.

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²¹⁰ Liam Magee, 2010, “A Framework for Assessing Commensurability of Semantic Web Ontologies,” Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management 8(1):91–102; Bill Cope, 2011, “Method for the Creation, Location and Formatting of Digital Content,” U.S. Patent US7886225B2.

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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. 322–323. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Metaontology §MS3.4