Metaontology

Structure (What holds this together?)

Metaontology

0.0 BILL: Finally, metaontology. This is a special kind of ontology which connects ontologies together into an overall schema of life and its meanings. The same logics of design and relation pertain, but this time to everything. In the old days, philosophers called this metaphysics, but we prefer “metaontology” because allows us to account for the inseparable play of the material and the ideal.

  • Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 322-32.

0.35 BILL: Indigenous peoples enacted metaontology in ceremony. Here we are at a ceremony with Yolŋu people in Yirrakala, Northeast Arhemland, Australia. The hand gestures with the leaves, the dance, the music, the sung lyrics express the meaning of the integrated spiritual and material world, the experienced present merging with the every-to-be re-enacted past. Everything can make sense if the frame of reference is as wide as the metaontology.

  • Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 332-35.

1.02 BILL: For over 3,000 years, Indian metaontology has been captured in the Vedas, here represented as a tree of knowledge.

  • Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 319-21.

1.11 BILL: Now, in our calculating modernity, we run our lives with digital ontologies, often of such a pedestrian variety that we barely notice them. Unicode is an ontology of graphemes. iCal is an ontology for the classification of names, times, places and commitments. The international classification of diseases is how doctors record your ailments. GeoNames connects with GPS to name all the places in the world. Mostly in the digital world, these ontologies have shaken down to just one for each domain. They make artificial intelligence seem more intelligent than it actually is.

1.46 BILL: And if you want to get a glimpse of the metaontology of modernity here it is – here a map of all the digital ontologies, the meaning of everything, but of course, not really everything…

  • Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 326-28.