Why ontologies are best left implicit (especially for credentials)

Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence or reality as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology often deals with questions concerning what entities exist or may be said to exist and how such entities may be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences. (Wikipedia)

I'd argue that the attempt to define what 'exists' within a given system is usually a conservative, essentialist move. It's often concerned with retro-fitting new things into the current status quo, a kind of Kuhnian attempt to save what might be termed 'normal science'.

Perhaps my favourite example of this kind of post-hoc ontology is from a reference Jorge Luis Borges makes to a fictional taxonomy in a book he calls Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge:

On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.

This, of course, is meant to be humorous. Nevertheless, we're in danger when a dominant group sees the current state of play as the 'natural order of things'. It's bad enough when this is latent, but even worse when essentialist worldviews are codified into laws — and by 'law' I'd include 'code'.

The thing that disturbs me most is when people accept the artefacts that have been left for them as the given circumstances of nature… It's this automatic acceptance of how things are that leads to a sense of helplessness about changing any of them. (Douglas Rushkoff)

I'd argue that the attempt to define an essentialist ontology of credentials is doomed from the outset. What we need instead is to ensure that our use of terms such as 'Open Badges' are what I would call 'productively ambiguous' — that is to say, in the Pragmatist tradition, 'good in the way of belief'.

In my doctoral thesis (better consumed as this ebook), I used Rorty's work along with that of William Empson to come up with a 'continuum of ambiguity'. The idea behind this continuum is that almost every term we use to describe 'reality' is metaphorical in some way. Terms we use to refer to things contain both denotative and connotative aspects meaning that the person using the term cannot be absolutely certain that the person they are communicating with will understand what they mean in the same way.

The more we try and create a one-to-one relationship between the utterance and the understanding of it, the more we are in danger of terms 'falling off' the continuum of ambiguity and becoming dead metaphors. They "lose vitality" and are "treated as counters within a social practice, employed correctly or incorrectly." (Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 171). Such terms have the status of cliché.

Returning to Open Badges: if it becomes a dead metaphor, it would be difficult to do any interesting and useful work with the term. What we need is to ensure our use of the term stays 'productively ambiguous' — pragmatically 'good in the way of belief'. Or, if you like your takeaways more pithy: Keep Badges Weird!