Practical Ontology : Worlds in STS and Anthropology
Christopher Gad, Casper Bruun Jensen, Brit Ross Winthereik · Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · 2015
An Ambitious QuestionThe following considerations are written in response to a debate among Danish anthropologists concerning the ontological question-whether we inhabit multiple worlds.On the one hand, as we argue below, this is an interesting and ethnographically consequential question.On the other hand, it is also a peculiar question, since it seems impossible to answer.It appears metaphysical, an issue that can be determined neither theoretically nor empirically.Thus, our response does not aim to 'answer' the question 'Do we inhabit multiple worlds?' either negatively or in the affirmative.Instead, we argue for the importance of (ethnographically and anthropologically) living with its undecideability.Between 1910 and 1913, Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell published Principia Mathematica.Based on the assumption that there is one singular mathematical world, their aspiration was to define the principles that NatureCulture 2015Copyright owned by the authors would allow the determination of all other mathematical truths.In 1931, however, Kurt Gödel famously responded with his incompleteness theorems.These stated, first, that a formal system cannot simultaneously be consistent and complete, and, second, that no system can prove its own consistency (Gödel 1962).Deploying Gödel's response in an anthropological context, we assume that the question of whether we inhabit many multiple worlds cannot be answered in general.Anthropologists, we suggest, will also have to live with the fact that the question of multiple words is undecideable.This argument, of course, is not exclusively determined by Gödel's 'deconstruction' of Principia Mathematica.Rather, it is informed by our position within amodern science and technology studies (STS).From this vantage point, the interest of posing the ontological question is not diminished.Yet, as we see it, the central issue is not to correctly 'answer' the question.Rather, the question is important because the possible answers create conceptual and empirical obligations and requirements for anthropological inquiry.Such engagement is not determined by what can be theoretically or formally 'proven'.Indeed, as we shall see below, different consequences might follow from seemingly identical answers, just as similar consequences might be drawn from what appear to be different views.But this variability itself suggests that the question of ontological multiplicity, and perhaps specifically its undecideability, is a productive entry point for considering important similarities and differences across anthropology and STS.