Revisionary and Descriptive Metaphysics

Abstract

The goal of formal ontological inquiry is to reveal the categorial str ucture of the mind-independent reality. In the first part of this article, I criticiz e t wo popular ways to study the categorial structure, Strong and Weak Modelling. In the second part of the article (secs. 3-5), I present my positive account. The systematic description of the different kinds of entities ass umed by our commonsense conceptions (Descriptive Metaphysics) forms a starting-point of the study of the categorial structure of t he world. However, it is the task of Revisionary Metaphysics to see k for the best conception of the categorial structure. Revisionary Metaphysics proceeds as testing alternative c onceptions of the categorial structure (different categorial schemes). The main new contribution of the article is to propose certain general principles for the comparison of such alternative conceptions.