This paper reconstructs ontologization functionally as a fundamental epistemic operation. Ontologization is not understood as a metaphysical statement about what exists, but as a specific form of functional stabilization through which finite cognitive systems transform a dynamic field of experience into identifiable, available for take-up, and referentially available units of reference. In the sense of Epistemics, ontologization is therefore to be understood as a cross-domain operative achievement of cognition under finite conditions. Finitude here designates the structural lack of fully available order. Ontologization as an operation is not confined to a single domain; its concrete conditions of stability, validity, and revision, however, are determined in domain-specific ways.Ontologization therefore does not generate truth about an independent reality, but rather the stable forms of reference within which perception, memory, expectation, action, and later truth claims first become possible. The analysis traces this operation from individual enactment to intersubjective stabilization. The transition from individual to intersubjective ontologization is reconstructed through joint attention and shared reference and is clarified by means of declarative pointing as a paradigmatic marker of this threshold.Language then appears as a secondary but powerful layer of fixation: it does not generate minimal ontologization from nothing, but condenses and extends existing references, preserves them across situations, and changes their conditions of revision. Against this background, the paper defines the malfunction of ontologization as absolutization, in which functional posits are misunderstood as final descriptions of reality. Ontologization thus proves to be at once a cross-domain enabling condition of cognition, a constitutive operation of shared epistemic reality, and a structural source of epistemic entrenchment.
Stefan Rapp (Mon,) studied this question.