Ontology, Ontology and Ontogeny

These words continually present me with a muddle. Lets start with Ontogeny which has been described as ‘the origin and development of an individual organism’ OED. Now Engestrom and Cole talk about the ontogeny of the individual when describing the various timelines surrounding an event. By this they mean their personal life story and history. They also talk of other timelines in which events are embedded namely social-cultural, historical, and phylogenetic. The moment to moment happenings within an event are referred to as microgenesis. The problem I have with Ontogeny is not its meaning but using the right word. I continually refer to it as Oncology and sometimes Ontology. Life is tough! Ontogeny and Ontology are very similar so easy to muddle.

Ontology and ontological present me with some problems and even now I am some time away from being able to use these terms automatically…incidently really interesting to hear report today on automaticity in learning to read. The woman from Warwick said that children were slowed down in their skills in fluency of writing because of the concentration on neatness… I can very much believe this. It was a typical example of cognitive overload – which they alluded to but this term was not used on the channel 4 report.

I think that part of the problem of using these terms lies in the fact that there are two distinct meanings:

i. ‘the science and study of being’ – a metaphysical perspective – I will look up definition from Theory of Knowledge

ii. and in logic and symbolisation based on the work of Lesniewski (1886 to 1939) ‘which attempls to interpret quantities without assuming that anything exists beyond written expressions’. It is in this sense that I think Sfard is probably using this word in her chapter…..