Meta Ontology

The analytical philosophy of the last hundred years has been heavily influenced by a doctrine to the effect that the key to the correct understanding of reality is captured syntactically in the `Fa' (or, in more sophisticated versions, in the `Rab') of standard firstorder predicate logic. Here `F' stands for what is general in reality and `a' for what is individual. Hence ''f(a)ntology''. Because predicate logic has exactly two syntactically different kinds of referring expressions---`F', `G', `R', etc., and `a', `b', `c', etc.---so reality must consist of exactly two correspondingly different kinds of entity: the general (properties, concepts) and the particular (things, objects). We describe the historical influence of this view, and also show how standard first-order predicate logic can be used for the logical formalization of a more adequate ''six category ontology'', which recognizes, at the level of both particulars and universals, not only things or objects but also events and qualities.