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This paper develops a new argument for ontological pluralism—the thesis that being fragments. The argument goes, roughly, as follows. It is conceivable that some beings are ontologically dissimilar. So, it is possible that some beings are ontologically dissimilar. This is sufficient for ontological pluralism. So, being fragments.

Indigenous water knowledge recognizes water as living, and that the relationship between people and water is one of reciprocity. Yet, Indigenous Peoples continue to struggle for water justice due to centuries long and ongoing colonial legacies that have intergenerational effects on self-determination, culture, and wellbeing. Using a narrative review, this paper explores how published research has used art and arts-based approaches to explore dimensions of water injustice, wellbeing and mental health with Indigenous communities living in the Arctic and Amazon regions. Within the three central themes of the review (wellbeing, water justice, and arts-based research approaches), the most discussed emergent themes were: relationship to place, kinship, the lived experience of water, ongoing changes to water, and storytelling and art as instruments of resistance and to make visible what is not visible. The paper discusses those themes from the literature, and possible areas of future research. The findings underscore the importance of including diverse voices, worldviews and knowledges in water governance, and the potential for arts-based approaches to facilitate intercultural and intergenerational efforts to address water injustice and advance Indigenous Peoples’ rights to self-determination.

The debate concerning ontology is heating up in the social sciences. How is this impacting anthropology and archaeology? What contributions can these disciplines make? Following a session at the 2010 Theoretical Archaeology Group conference at Brown University (“‘Worlds Otherwise’: Archaeology, Theory, and Ontological Difference,” convened by Ben Alberti and Yvonne Marshall), a group of archaeologists and anthropologists have continued to discuss the merits, possibilities, and problems of an ontologically oriented approach. The current paper is a portion of this larger conversation—a format we maintain here because, among other things, it permits a welcome level of candor and simplicity. In this forum we present two questions (written by Alberti and Witmore, along with the concluding comments) and the responses of five of the Theoretical Archaeology Group session participants. The first question asks why we think an ontological approach is important to our respective fields; the second, building upon the first set of responses, asks authors to consider the difference that pluralizing ontology might make and whether such a move is desirable given the aims of archaeology and anthropology. While several angles on ontology come through in the conversation, all share an interest in more immanent understandings that arise within specific situations and that are perhaps best described as thoroughly entangled rather than transcendent and/or oppositional in any straightforward sense.

Indigenous peoples are easily classified as either dangerously vulnerable or inherently resilient to climate risks. There are elements of truth in both categorical statements. Yet neither is completely true. Indigenous vulnerability and resilience, and Indigenous groups’ adaptive responses to climate change, need to be understood in the messy contexts of lived experience, rather than either elegant social theories or didactic ideological politics. Climate change action and research needs to acknowledge and engage with the knowledges, ontologies and experiences of diverse Indigenous groups, along with the specific histories, geographies and impacts of colonization, and their consequences for both the colonized and colonizers. Climate change action and research needs to be integrated into wider de-colonial projects as the transformative impacts of anthropogenic climate change are inadequately addressed within both colonial and post-colonial frames. Negotiating respectful modes of belonging-together-in-Country to reshape people-to-people, people-to-environment and people-to-cosmos relationships in Indigenous domains is essential in responding to planetary scale changes in coupled human and natural systems. This paper outlines an approach that nurtures Indigenous self-determination and inter-generational healing to rethink the geopolitics of Indigenous resilience, vulnerability and adaptation in an era of climate change and the resurgence of Great Power geopolitics.

A distinctive form of anticolonial analysis has been emerging from Latin America (LA) in recent decades. This decolonial theory argues that important new insights about modernity, its politics, and epistemology become visible if one starts off thinking about them from the experiences of those colonized by the Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas. For the decolonial theorists, European colonialism in the Americas, on the one hand, and modernity and capitalism (and their sciences) in Europe, on the other hand, coproduced and coconstituted each other. The effects of that history persist today. Starting thought from these LA histories and current realities enables envisioning new resources for social transformations. These decolonial insights seem to receive only a passing recognition in the Latin American social studies of science and technology projects that have begun cosponsoring events and publications with northern equivalents. My focus will be primarily on the decolonial theory and on just two of its themes. One is the critical resources it offers for creating more accurate and progressive northern philosophies and histories of science as well as social studies of science. The second is insights from Latin American feminists that carry different impacts in the context of the decolonial accounts.

'Theory' is one of the most important words in the lexicon of contemporary sociology. Yet, their ubiquity notwithstanding, it is quite unclear what sociologists mean by the words 'theory,' 'theoretical,' and 'theorize.' I argue that confusions about the meaning of 'theory' have brought about undesirable consequences, including conceptual muddles and even downright miscommunication. In this paper I tackle two questions: (a) what does 'theory' mean in the sociological language?; and (b) what ought 'theory' to mean in the sociological language? I proceed in five stages. First, I explain why one should ask a semantic question about 'theory.' Second, I lexicographically identify seven different senses of the word, which I distinguish by means of subscripts. Third, I show some difficulties that the current lack of semantic clarity has led sociology to. Fourth, I articulate the question, 'what ought \"theory\" to mean?,' which I dub the 'semantic predicament' (SP), and I consider what one can learn about it from the theory literature. Fifth, I recommend a 'semantic therapy' for sociology, and advance two arguments about SP: (a) the principle of practical reason--SP is to a large extent a political issue, which should be addressed with the help of political mechanisms; and (b) the principle of ontological and epistemological pluralism--the solution to SP should not be too ontologically and epistemologically demanding.

Based on a large cross-cultural study, David Rose et al. (in: Lombrozo et al. (eds) Oxford studies in experimental philosophy, Vol. 3, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 158–174, 2020) argue that the Ship of Theseus story is a genuine puzzle in the sense that people who consider it feel inclined to assert two prima facie inconsistent propositions ( Ambivalence ). In response, Marta Campdelacreu et al. (Dialectica 74(3):551–559, 2020) argue that the data reported by Rose et al. (2020) fail to support Ambivalence . Namely, the data show sharp interpersonal disagreement among different readers of the Ship of Theseus story, but they fail to demonstrate an intrapersonal conflict or indecision. Should intrapersonal Ambivalence be demonstrated, this, according to Campdelacreu et al. (2020), would be a good indicator of the presence of a puzzle. Here, I provide empirical evidence for intrapersonal Ambivalence about the Ship of Theseus story.

Natural resource governance challenges are often highly complex, particularly in Indigenous contexts. These challenges involve numerous landscape-level interactions, spanning jurisdictional, disciplinary, social, and ecological boundaries. In Eeyou Istchee, the James Bay Cree Territory of northern Quebec, Canada, traditional livelihoods depend on wild food species like moose. However, these species are increasingly being impacted by forestry and other resource development projects. The complex relationships between moose, resource development, and Cree livelihoods can limit shared understandings and the ability of diverse actors to respond to these pressures. Contributing to this complexity are the different knowledge systems held by governance actors who, while not always aligned, have broadly shared species conservation and sustainable development goals. This paper presents fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM) as a methodological approach used to help elicit and interpret the knowledge of land-users concerning the impacts of forest management on moose habitat in Eeyou Istchee. We explore the difficulties of weaving this knowledge together with the results of moose GPS collar analysis and the knowledges of scientists and government agencies. The ways in which participatory, relational mapping approaches can be applied in practice, and what they offer to pluralistic natural resource governance research more widely, are then addressed.

This article aims to provide a metaphysical elucidation of the notion of Theism and a coherent theological synthesis of two extensions of this notion: Classical Theism and Neo-Classical Theism. A model of this notion and its extensions is formulated within the ontological pluralism framework of Kris McDaniel and Jason Turner, and the (modified) modal realism framework of David Lewis, which enables it to be explicated clearly and consistently, and two often raised objections against the elements of this notion can be successfully answered.

Conceptual modeling grammars are a fundamental means for specifying information systems requirements. However, the actual usage of these grammars is only poorly understood. In particular, little is known about how properties of these grammars inform usage beliefs such as usefulness and ease of use. In this paper, we use an ontological theory to describe conceptual modeling grammars in terms of their ontological deficiencies, and formulate two propositions in regard to how these ontological deficiencies influence primary usage beliefs. Using BPMN as an example modeling grammar, we surveyed 528 modeling practitioners to test the theorized relationships. Our results show that users of conceptual modeling grammars perceive ontological deficiencies to exist, and that these deficiency perceptions are negatively associated with usefulness and ease of use of these grammars. With our research, we provide empirical evidence in support of the predictions of the ontological theory of modeling grammar expressiveness, and we identify previously unexplored links between conceptual modeling grammars and grammar usage beliefs. This work implies for practice a much closer coupling of the act of (re-)designing modeling grammars with usage-related success metrics.