Definitions

Ontology specification of a conceptualisation of a knowledge domain. An ontology is a controlled vocabulary that describes objects and the relations between them in a formal way, and has a grammar for using the vocabulary terms to express something meaningful within a specified domain of interest. The vocabulary is used to make queries and assertions. Ontological commitments are agreements to use the vocabulary in a consistent way for knowledge sharing. .. a study of the ultimate nature of things.

Ontology can be said to study conceptions of reality; and, for the sake of distinction, at least to the extent to which its counterpart, epistemology can be represented as being a search for answers to the questions "What do you know?" and "How do you know it?", ontology can be represented as a search for an answer to the question "What is the nature of the knowable things?". Social scientists adopt one of four main ontological approaches: realism (the idea that facts are out there just waiting to be discovered), empiricism (the idea that we can observe the world and evaluate those observations in relation to facts), positivism (which focuses on the observations themselves, attentive more to claims about facts than to facts themselves), and postmodernism (which holds that facts are fluid and elusive, so that we should focus only on our observational claims). the doctrine that truth is the practical efficacy of an idea. Pragmatism A term, first used by CS Peirce in 1878, describing a doctrine that determines value through the test of consequences or utility. The pragmatist insists that no questions are significant unless the results of answering them in one way rather than another have practical consequences. The pragmatists' world is pluralistic, attentive to context, relativistic about truth and value, devoid of metaphysical concerns except as they have practical consequences. ... Pragmatism is a school of philosophy which originated in the United States in the late 1800s. Pragmatism is characterized by the insistence on consequences, utility and practicality as vital components of truth. Pragmatism objects to the view that human concepts and intellect alone accurately represent reality, and therefore stands in opposition to both formalist and rationalist schools of philosophy. ...