An Eliminativist Ontology of the Digital World—and What It Means for Data Curation

It seems we have quite a bit to say about things that don’t exist. This is fine as long we don’t confuse ourselves — and, indeed, idiom and metaphor are indispensable to ordinary communication. But increasingly information systems design, policies, procedures, and documentation are based on logic-based knowledge representation strategies that are profoundly literal, and profoundly unforgiving. Accommodating these strategies will require developing ontologies that revise our common sense conceptual schemes in ways that are sure to be unsettling. These ontologies may be more accurate, and, in the long run they may even be more serviceable, but they will not be familiar, and they will require substantial revision of our descriptions of common activities and processes.