Ontology is not just about objects: Poorly individuated phenomena in geo-ontology

摘要

We are often tempted to think of the world as some totality of things. Things - or objects - are discrete clear-cut chunks of reality: they seem to be the immediate objects of our everyday, language-mediated engagement with the world. It is easy to forget that a good deal of what exists does not come so readily packaged into objects. There is all the water, rock, topsoil, vegetation, cloud, and so on which mostly present themselves to us as unbroken continua in which gradation rather than clear-cut boundaries is the norm, and from which it requires some cognitive effort to extract chunks sufficiently well-defined and stable to merit the description of objects. Describing the world in terms of objects comes naturally to us because our language and our technical analytical tools are highly object-oriented. This works well so long as we confine ourselves to describing situations in which there are well-defined, discrete individuals with clear criteria of identity, but in most real-life situations we are faced with a world of graded transitions and constant flux, in which the picking out of discrete individuals to be the objects of our discourse becomes clearly problematic - and is often acknowledged to be such. This is particularly the case in the geographical domain, where in addition to more or less well-defined objects such as people, buildings, cities, countries, lakes, rivers, roads, and railways (all of which, admittedly, also present identity-related problems), we have to handle numerous fields, i.e., functions assigning values of some sort to locations, as exemplified, for example, in maps showing elevation, soil types, land cover, or land use.