Contemporary philosophy increasingly confronts objects that are produced, maintained, and acted upon without direct involvement of a knowing subject. Technical data, scientific entities, institutional objects, and symbolic structures exhibit forms of objectivity that resist traditional substance-based or subject-centered ontologies. This paper proposes a second-order ontological framework centered on the notion of fixation. Fixation designates the minimal mechanism through which distinctions become objectified and reproducible, thereby acquiring historical persistence. On this account, objecthood is not a primitive given but a historical achievement sustained by specific conditions of reproducibility. Reproducibility is articulated as the decisive criterion of objecthood, understood as a graded and failure-sensitive property rather than a binary one. Objects differ in the robustness, redundancy, and vulnerability of the conditions that sustain their fixation, allowing for distinctions between stability, drift, dormancy, and ontological death without recourse to essentialism. The framework further distinguishes between modes of objectification and ontological carriers, clarifying how objects may persist, mutate, or collapse across heterogeneous domains. By explicitly separating ontological analysis from epistemic or normative evaluation, the ontology of fixation accounts for the reality of false, contested, or dysfunctional objects without endorsing their claims or authority. The paper demonstrates how this approach resolves several persistent philosophical problems concerning objectivity, error, and non-material entities, and concludes by identifying new questions that arise once objecthood is treated as a reproducible and historical process.
Alexey POLOVINKIN (Thu,) studied this question.