In this article Smith and Mark describe an experiment that investigates the possible existence of a “folk” geospatial ontology. The concept of different scientific fields all having a corresponding folk ontology is is fascinating. The notion that scientific ontologies actually have roots in their folk ontologies suggests that a scientific field comes about from a paradigm shift from the folk ontology. While the authors brought up the issue that the “legitimacy” of these folk ontologies is often brought into question, I wish they had gone into more detail about what constitutes legitimacy in these discussions. Also, I wonder if traditional Chinese medicine would be best described as a folk ontology corresponding to the scientific ontology of modern western medicine. The distinction between good and bad conceptualizations seemed slightly problematic to me. A good conceptualization is defined as one that is transparent to a corresponding independent domain of reality. A bad conceptualization, meanwhile, is associated with a pseudo-domain. However, isn’t it probable that in the future, conceptualizations that we currently consider good will be judged to be bad, and that domains of today will be regarded as pseudo-domains in the future? With regard to geographic folk ontologies, I’m not very surprised that folk geography was found to be a single ontology in this study. The fact that it is widely taught as a subject in primary and secondary schools around the world probably strengthens its unity. Geography has gone through so many paradigmatic changes since the 1950s, that what we may regard as a geographic folk ontology may actually be the remnants of what was considered the scientific geographic ontology half a century ago.
-Yojo