Ontic

In philosophical ontology, ontic (from the Greek ὄν, genitive ὄντος: "of that which is") is physical, real, or factual existence.

Overview

Ontic describes what is there, as opposed to the nature or properties of that being. To illustrate :

• Roger Bacon, observing that all languages are built upon a common grammar, stated that they share a foundation of ontically anchored linguistic structures.
• Martin Heidegger posited the concept of Sorge, or caring, as the fundamental concept of the intentional being, and presupposed an ontological significance that distinguishes ontological being from mere "thinghood" of an ontic being. He uses the German word Dasein for a being that is capable of ontology, that is, recursively comprehending properties of the very fact of its own Being. For Heidegger, ontical signifies concrete, specific realities, whereas "ontological" signifies deeper underlying structures of reality. Ontological objects or subjects have an ontical dimension, but they also include aspects of being like self-awareness, evolutionary vestiges, future potentialities, and networks of relationship.
• Nicolai Hartmann distinguishes among ontology, ontics, and metaphysics: (i) ontology concerns the categorical analysis of entities by means of the knowledge categories able to classify them, (ii) ontics refers to a pre-categorical and pre-objectual connection which is best expressed in the relation to transcendent acts, and (iii) metaphysics is that part of ontics or that part of ontology which concerns the residue of being that cannot be rationalized further according to categories.

The Ontic for Heidegger

In Being & Time, the distinction between the ontological and the ontic is of seminal importance. While Heidegger never explicitly defines the ontic, over the course of the book the definition grows clearer and clearer wherein which the ontological inquiry is concerned primarily with Being and the ontical inquiry is concerned primarily with entities and the facts about them. If one were to ground these notions in a more classical notion of philosophy, the ontological (for Heidegger) is a nearer inquiry into essence, while the ontical is a nearer inquiry into substance.

For Heidegger, the ontic can be further understood as an always more superficial form of knowing and it encompasses the sciences (exact & hard), the social sciences (soft) and even forms of the humanities (such as historicism). The reason for this superficiality according to Heidegger is that if "Basic concepts determine the way in which we get an understanding beforehand of the area of subject-matter underlying all the objects a science takes as its theme, and all positive investigation is guided by this understanding," then, the ability to work within the basic concepts preceding positive investigation is where we work ontologically and which will define the field of possible understanding for the ontical investigation.

He uses this same reasoning to distinguish his method of investigation into Being (the analytic of dasein) from "Anthropology, Psychology, and Biology." These three studies are all ontical in that they presuppose that a person is a "Thing, a substance and an object". He particularly critiques Anthropology for the following reason:

The rich store of information now available as to the most exotic and manifold cultures and forms of Dasein seems favourable to our setting about this task in a fruitful way [Our task being to workout 'a natural conception of the world']. But this is merely a semblance. At bottom of this plethora of information can seduce us into failing to recognize the real problem. We shall not get a genuine knowledge of essences simply by the syncretistic activity of universal comparison and classification. Subjecting the manifold to tabulation does not ensure any actual understanding of what lies there before us as thus set in order. If an order principle is genuine, it has its own content as a thing, which is never to be found by means of such ordering, but is already presupposed in it.

What he is saying here is that the project of anthropoligizing primitive cultures in order to find the essence of humanity is folly because merely is an organization of global culture and in its tabulation and classification it has already presupposed what humanity is.

Philosophy of science

In philosophy of science, ontic is primarily used in debates over the nature of explanation and about structural realism. Wesley Salmon's ontic conception of explanation, for instance, claims that explanations are ontic only if they are mind-independent things in the world.

Harald Atmanspacher suggests that accurate claims about "ontic states describe all properties of a physical system exhaustively. ('Exhaustive' in this context means that an ontic state is 'precisely the way it is,' without any reference to epistemic knowledge or ignorance.)"^[1]

In an earlier paper, Atmanspacher portrays the difference between an epistemic perspective of a system, and an ontic perspective:

Philosophical discourse traditionally distinguishes between ontology and epistemology and generally enforces this distinction by keeping the two subject areas separated. However, the relationship between the two areas is of central importance to physics and philosophy of physics. For instance, many measurement-related problems force us to consider both our knowledge of the states and observables of a system (epistemic perspective) and its states and observables, independent of such knowledge (ontic perspective). This applies to quantum systems in particular.^[2]

Critical realism

The British philosopher Roy Bhaskar, who is closely associated with the philosophical movement of critical realism writes:

"I differentiate the 'ontic' ('ontical' etc.) from the 'ontological'. I employ the former to refer to

1. whatever pertains to being generally, rather than some distinctively philosophical (or scientific) theory of it (ontology), so that in this sense, that of the ontic₁, we can speak of the ontic presuppositions of a work of art, a joke or a strike as much as a theory of knowledge; and, within this rubric, to
2. the intransitive objects of some specific, historically determinate, scientific investigation (or set of such investigations), the ontic₂.

"The ontic₂ is always specified, and only identified, by its relation, as the intransitive object(s) of some or other (denumerable set of) particular transitive process(es) of enquiry. It is cognitive process-, and level-specific; whereas the ontological (like the ontic₁) is not."^[3]

Writing in the Bhaskar mailing list archive, Ruth Groff offers this expansion of Bhaskar's note above:

"'ontic₂' is an abstract way of denoting the object-domain of a particular scientific area, field, or inquiry. E.g.: molecules feature in the ontic₂ of chemistry. He's just saying that the scientific undertaking ITSELF is not one of the objects of said, most narrowly construed, immediate object-domain. So chemistry itself is not part of the ontic₂ of chemistry."

Some have argued that Bhaskar himself was too deeply entwined in the inherent vices and pitfalls of the English language to translate in simple terms the meaning of the terminology from a purely etymological sense. Derivative of ontic and logos.

See also

• Ding an sich
• Interpretations of quantum mechanics
• Ontologism
• Physical ontology
• Substance theory

Sources

• Atmanspacher, Dr. H., and Primas, H., 2003 [2005], "Epistemic and Ontic Quantum Realities", in Khrennikov, A (Ed.), Foundations of Probability and Physics (American Institute of Physics 2005, pp 49–61, Originally published in Time, Quantum and Information, edited by Lutz Castell and Otfried Ischebeck, Springer, Berlin, 2003, pp 301–321
• Atmanspacher, Harald (2001) Determinism Is Ontic, Determinability is Epistemic (University of Pittsburgh Archives)
• Wright, Cory (2015) The ontic conception of scientific explanation. Stud in History and Philosophy of Science, 54: 20–30 ([4])
• ^ Bhaskar, R.A., 1986, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation (London: Verso), pp 36 and 37, as quoted by Howard Engelskirchen in the \Bhaskar mailing list archive