pursuing the second project is not straightforward. There are several methodological
considerations worth stating explicitly at the outset. A discussion of them occupies
section 4.2. Here’s what will transpire in the rest of this chapter. In section 4.3,
I will discuss several competing accounts of ontological categories. In section 4.4,
I will motivate the view that ontological categories are modes of being. Section
4.5 will contain a discussion of the nature of so-called“category mistakes,”which
will be briefly mentioned in 4.2 as well. Section 4.6 is devoted to an exploration of the
status of the putative discipline offormal ontologyconstrued as the study of those
fundamental and necessary features that objects have in virtue of being objects. There
I argue that formal ontology so construed requires thatobjectbe an ontological
category. (But, as will emerge in section 4.6 and in many other places to come in this
book, it isn’t.) Alternative conceptions of formal ontology will be described as well.
Finally, in section 4.7, I briefly discuss whether the theory of ontological categories
put forth here implies that the actual ontological categories are ontological categories
at every possible world.
4.2 Methodological Considerations
There are three methodological considerations I will discuss here, which for brevity’s
sake I will subsume under the headings ofneutrality,descriptiveness, andfunction-
ality. I will address each in turn, although these considerations are not independent
of each other.
Neutrality: To what extent should the project of determining what it is to be
an ontological category be independent of the project of defending a list of
ontological categories? In other words, how independent is this branch of
meta-ontology from ontology proper? If a theory of the nature of ontological
categories implies that something is (or isnot) an ontological category, is that a
cost of the theory?My view is that neutrality is overrated, but not everyone agrees, and so for part of the
chapter I’ll try to be neutral with respect to neutrality. As I see things, the goal is not
merely to give a definition of a technical term that is used by two or more disputants
about a given list of putative ontological categories. If this were the sole goal—to
clarify the terms of a given debate—it might make sense to be neutral on which
debater has the correct list. For otherwise we risk misconstruing a substantive
ontological debate as a non-substantive one in which one of the participants is
wrong as a matter of definition. But if this isn’t the goal, what is? The other two
methodological considerations are relevant to answering this question.
Descriptiveness: To what extent is the project of determining what it is to be an
ontological category an attempt to describe in clearer terms a pre-theoretically
recognized phenomenon?