As names of divisions of philosophy go, ‘ontology’ is a rather new word. Although it is older than that terminological parvenu ‘epistemology’, it is much newer than ‘metaphysics’ or ‘ethics’ or ‘logic’ – and, of course, it is much newer than ‘philosophy’. But the word is as hard to define as any of her elder sisters. Within analytical philosophy one finds three understandings of the word ‘ontology’ – or, if you like, three conceptions of ontology.

One of them, the use of the word by Bergmann and his school, is that ontology is the study of the ontological structure of objects. I reject this conception of ontology. I reject it as provincial, as the identification of a kingdom with one of its provinces. (In my view – I defend this view in an essay that is a sort of companion piece to the present chapter – that province is uninhabited. But I do not reject the Bergmannian conception of ontology on that ground alone: I contend that it is a provincial conception even if objects do have ontological structures.)