Abstract

Empirical, logical, historical and mathematical inquiries may be able to tell us what it is ultimately right for us to believe in these various fields, and, in this pragmatic sense, they may be able to tell us what is true. But such inquiries cannot tell us what must exist in reality for them to be true, since they cannot tell us what their truthmakers are. To do this, we have to step back from the particular disciplines of science, mathematics, history, and so on, and seek to offer a general account of the nature of reality – one that is adequate to accommodate most of our empirical and theoretical knowledge of it. This is the task of ontology. It is not one that can be left to scientists, or other specialist inquirers, for at least two important reasons. The methodology of ontology is necessarily very different from that of any specialist field, and the account that it seeks to offer must be general. It cannot be limited to any one field of inquiry. In this paper, I shall describe and defend a strategy for arriving at an ontology that depends on keeping ontological and epistemological questions apart. The strategy is required, I shall argue, because these two sorts of questions are easily confused with one another.