Ontological dynamics

language is an ontological field?

let’s fix a language L. let’s suppose L = “english”.

words in L exist or they don’t.

unless/until new words are made, of course. for now, though, let’s keep L static, not dynamic.

the words “present” and “absent” both exist in L. they are both positive in the sense that they are there in the language, both of them.

when language refers to something non-linguistic – say, the physical presence or absence of a person – then two levels seem to be at play at once. let’s think of them as two different ontological fields. on the level of the physical, say, there might be an absence or presence of a person, a “yes” or a “no” to the question of whether that person is physically there in a specific place. on the other hand, the words “yes” and “no”, “present” and “absent”, are all present in L. they are all “there”.

a different sort of situation is when a physical phenomenon doesn’t have a name or a known, fitting, description in L. it would seem then that in this case, the phenomenon itself is present in the physical ontological field, and that there is an actual absence in the ontological field of the language L.

now let’s no longer restrict L to be frozen in a static state. languages do change, morph, and grow, after all.

a tricky thing then seems to be: on the level of the language L, we have quite a lot of freedom and flexibility to create new things – new words, new concepts, new ways of formulating and articulating, new habits, rules, mannerisms, and styles. language is malleable on personal, intrapersonal, and social scales.

this malleability seems subject to certain dynamics, certain processes of change. ontological dynamics.

on the other hand, in other ontological fields – for instance the physical field of every-day human scales – there is a different kind of malleability at play, a different ontological dynamics. humans cannot create new physical objects, or relationships between them, in the same ways that they can create new words and phrases and linguistic constellations. we can indeed create new entities and relations in the physical, but the ontological dynamics are simply different. different forces, different laws, different processes are involved.

ontological fields can interact, they can be related to one another, and effect and influence each other.

for instance, language is shaped by physical ontological fields. words and concepts often arise as sorts of representations or abstractions of physical entities and situations. and the sounds of speech, or the shape of written words, are contingent on the physics of the acoustic and the visual. conversely, language in turn shapes how we behave and engage in the phsyical world. as they say, words matter.

ontological fields do not have sharp boundaries. they can overlap, converge and diverge, can be nested inside each other, differentiated into parts, or combined in amalgamations. for example, the english language might be thought instead as a composite which includes such parts as vocal language, written language, and thought language.

what is then an ontological field?

a first approximation, via metaphor, is that an ontonological field is like the concept of an electromagnetic field from classical electrodynamics.

a field is something spread out and extended thoughout all of space. at any given moment in time, and at any location, we can, in principle, measure the field. this amounts to measuring a certain quantity which signifies “how much” or “how instensely” that field is present in the given moment and location.

underlying the notion of electromagnetic field is the notion of electromagnetic force. and force seems to be a mysterious notion which is offered up as an explanation for why certain things change. an explanation of why, for example, magnets attract and repel, and why electrons flow through conductive wires.

an influential idea from the history of physics is that there exist small fundamental building blocks of the universe, fundamental particles. and that these are moved – caused to change their course – by fundamental forces. different kinds of particles are moved by different kinds of forces. electrons happen to be moved by the electromagnetic force. and the idea of an electromagnetic field is that it mediates this force. electrons are also, for example, moved by gravitational force. how strongly an electron is affected by elctronmagnetic forces is measured by its “charge”. how strongly an electron is affected by gravitational forces is measured by is “mass”.

not only are electrons moved via an electromagentic field, but each electron also generates an electromagnetic field – one that will influence, for example, any other electrons that might be around. and electromagnetic fields can be combined, added together. a bunch of electrons hanging around will generate a composite electromagnetic field which can be thought either as one total field, or as a sum of distinct parts.

classical electrodynamics turned out to have limitations and problems that spurred new theories, new ideas and refinements. and if we wanted to push our metaphor further, those would certainly be valuable to explore.

but let’s return to ontological fields! the analogy is thus:

similar to how various substances are built up of fundamental particles, assembled in dizzyling complex arrangements, so too are ontological entities built up from simpler pieces.

similar to how electrons have a “charge” or a “mass”, so too do ontological entities have a “presence” with respect to various types of ontological fields.

similar to how any electromagenetic field is a composite of the fields generated by a collection of charged particles and their relations in space, so too is an ontological field a composite generated from a collection of present entities and their relations in a space.

surely this analogy should be held loosely. however it gives one initial model to play with. variations of it offer interesting inways of thought. for example, one question might be about the notion of space and relationships between particles/entities. in classical elctrodynamics, for example…. distance matters. in general relativity, space is no longer a passive container, but is instead alive, malleable, dynamic; it interacts with mass. in quantum electrodynamics, self-interaction of particles are taken into account…

( also go into wave particle duality somewhere ? )