Ontology as a contingent science

Consider major dividing lines in ontology, such as between trope theory and Platonism. Assume theism. Then all possibilities for everything other than God are grounded in God.

If God is ontologically like us, and in particular not simple, then it is reasonable to think that the correct ontological theory is necessarily determined by God’s nature. For instance, if God has tropes, then necessarily trope theory holds for creatures. If God participates in distinct Platonic forms like Divinity and Wisdom, then necessarily Platonism holds for creatures.

But the orthodox view (at least in Christianity and Judaism) is that God is absolutely simple, and predication works for God very differently from how it works for us. In light of this, why should we think that God had to create a tropist world rather than a Platonic one, or a Platonic one rather than a tropist one? Neither seems more or less suited to being created by God. It seems natural, in light of the radical difference between God and creatures, to think that God could create either kind of world.

If so, then many ontological questions seem to become contingent. And that’s surprising and counterintuitive.

Well, maybe. But I think there is still a way—perhaps not fully satisfactory—of bringing some of these questions back to the realm of necessity. Our language is tied to our reality. Suppose that we live in a tropist world. It seems that the correct account of predication is then a tropist one: A creature is wise if and only if it has a wisdom trope. A Platonic world has no wisdom tropes, and hence no wise creatures. Indeed, nothing can be predicated of any creature in it. What might be going on in the Platonic world is that there are things there that are structurally analogous wise things, or to predication. We can now understand our words “wise” and “predicated” narrowly, in the way they apply to creatures in our world, or we can understand them broadly as including anything structurally analogous to these meanings. If we understand them narrowly, then it is correct to say that “Nothing in the Platonist world is wise” and “Nothing is correctly predicated of anything in the Platonist world.” But in the wide, analogical sense, there are wise things and there is predication in the Platonist world. Note, too, that even in our world it is correct to say “God is wise” and “Something is correctly predicated of God” only in the wide senses of the terms.

On this account, necessity returns to ontology—when we understand things narrowly. But the pretensions of ontology should be chastened by realizing that God could have made a radically different world.

And maybe there is an advantage to this contingentism. Our reasoning in ontology is always somewhat driven by principles of parsimony. But while one can understand why parsimony is appropriately pursued in study of the contingent—for God can be expected to create the contingent parsimoniously, both for aesthetic reasons and to fit reality to our understanding—I have always been mystified why it is appropriately pursued in the study of the necessary. But if ontology is largely a matter of divine creative choice, then parsimony is to be sought in ontological theories just as in physical ones, and with the same theological justification.

The above sounds plausible. But I have a hard time believing in ontology as a contingent science.