Ontology deals with questions about what things exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped according to similarities and differences.
Ontology asks whether "categories of being" arefundamental.
Some philosophers, of thePlatonic school, say that all nouns (includingabstract nouns) refer to actualentities. Other philosophers contend that nouns do not always name entities. They think some are a kind ofshorthand for a collection of eitherobjects orevents.
In this view,mind, instead of referring to an entity, refers to a collection ofmental events experienced by aperson.Society refers to a collection ofpersons with some shared characteristics, andgeometry refers to a collection of a specific kind of intellectual activity.[3]
Between these poles, calledrealism andnominalism, are other positions. Any ontology must give an account of which words refer to entities, which do not, why, and what categories result.
