word in use

Peter Erdélyi notes that “ontography” was already used by Michael Lynch of Cornell. I’m just up with a brief bit of insomnia and have only half-scanned the paper, but Lynch’s very nice paper is obviously in complete opposition to my own views about things. He’s one of those STS people who happens to think everything should be done empirically. He says, for instance:

“Ontography would involve the same sort of mundane, deflationary transformation as suggested by epistemography and ethigraphy. To put it in practical terms, the first step is to establish the salience of ontology to some case under study. This step presupposes that ‘ontology’ is not always and everywhere salient, and that when it is salient it remains to
be determined just how it is salient.”

Also no mention of M.R. James’s comical use of the term, so unless it turns out that “ontography” in Lynch’s sense has really caught on in the STS lexicon, I’ll go ahead and use it in my different sense (with a footnote to Lynch).

Thanks, Peter.