Ontography as the Study of Locally Organized Ontologies

Ontography is distinguished from ontology in the way it pursues historical or ethnographic case studies, rather than general philosophical reflections on the nature of being. Ontography takes classical metaphysical problems, such as how to distinguish between natural entities and human technologies, but instead of offering a general solution to those problems it describes how socially, historically, and institutionally situated agents address and provisionally resolve those problems. Examples of such investigations are practical efforts to resolve the difference between research artifacts and evidence of microscopical entities in laboratory research, and cases in intellectual property law which deploy a distinction between products of nature and compositions of matter.