Ontography as the Study of Locally Organized

Ontologies
Michael Lynch

I first used the term »ontography« in the postscript of a special issue of

the journal Social Studies of Science on »the turn to ontology« in the field of Science
and Technology Studies (STS).1 In their introduction to the special issue, the guest
editors, Steve Woolgar and Javier Lezaun, noted that there had been an upsurge
in the use of the term »ontology« in STS, anthropology, and other social science
fields.2 Woolgar, Lezaun, and other contributors to the special issue expressed both
heightened interest in and skepticism about this »turn to ontology.« The »turn«
in question was not a turn back to an ancient branch of metaphysics concerned
with the constitution of reality, though some of the authors who embraced it
did indulge in metaphysical discourse. To the extent that it was a metaphysical
movement, the turn to ontology was a turn from one metaphysical orientation to
another; from a humanist treatment of representation and meaning-making, to a
post-humanist (re)distribution of agency among humans, non-human beings, and
material things. This turn was an empirical turn that aimed to investigate particu-
lar domains of social action (including but not limited to scientific, technical, and
medical actions) in which things (though not necessarily things-as-such; self-suf-
ficient, non-relational entities) were highly salient, not only as objects but also as
agents, agencies, and intermediaries.
The turn to ontology is sometimes presented as a reaction to an over-emphasis
on epistemology in earlier work in STS and related fields, particularly work asso-
ciated with social constructionism in the sociology of scientific knowledge, which
seemed to reduce obdurate material realities to historically, socially, and cultur-
ally situated practices and knowledges. Turning to ontology did not necessarily
represent a reversion to scientific realism, but it did invite renewed inquiry into
the resiliency and robustness of things and a search for novel ways to conceive of
things as other than docile expressions of purposive human practices and/or reified

1 Michael Lynch: Ontography: Investigating the Production of Things, Deflating Onto-

logy, in: Social Studies of Science 43/3 (2013), pp.  4 44–462.
2 Steve Woolgar and Javier Lezaun: The Wrong Bin Bag: A Turn to Ontology in Science
and Technology Studies?, in: Social Studies of Science 43/3 (2013), pp.  321–340.

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148 Michael Lynch

ideologies. For some writers, the turn to ontology was a way to turn away from
an exclusively humanistic conception of action and agency in favor of a post-hu-
manist treatment in which ultimate sources of agency are left open in fields or
networks of humans, technologies, non-human beings, and things.3
In the postscript of the special issue, I suggested the term »ontography« as an
alternative to »ontology« that would be more congruent with a descriptive orien-
tation to social, cultural, and historical conceptions of things, beings, and relations
among them. At the time, I thought »ontography« was a neologism, and only af-
ter I had begun drafting the paper did I conduct a word search that informed me
other­w ise. My search turned up various conceptions of »ontography« in philoso-
phy, cognitive science, and other fields, all of which differed from what I intended
with the term. However, I did not mean to propose an entirely original idea,
because I derived »ontography« from another obscure term, »epistemography.«
Before proceeding with what I mean by »ontography,« allow me to give a brief
gloss on »epistemography.«

1.  From -ology to -ography

Historian of science Peter Dear uses the term epistemography to draw a contrast
between science studies (historical and social studies of scientific discourse and
practice) and philosophical epistemology.4 He emphasizes that the former term is
descriptive while the latter one is normative. According to Dear:

»The term ›epistemography‹ is intended to bring some clarity to the discussion by propos-
ing a loose grouping of the most central and characteristic kinds of work currently en-
compassed by the label ›science studies.‹ The grouping strategy relies on making explicit
the following recognition: the field of science studies is driven by attempts to understand
what science, as a human activity, actually is and has been. Epistemography is the en-
deavor that attempts to investigate science ›in the field,‹ as it were, asking such questions
as these: What counts as scientific knowledge? How is that knowledge made and certi-
fied? In what ways is it used or valued? ›Epistemography‹ as a term signals that descriptive

3 See, for examples, Bruno Latour: Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engi-
neers through Society, Cambridge, MA 1987; Bruno Latour: An Inquiry into Modes of
Existence, Cambridge, MA 2013; Andrew Pickering: The Mangle of Practice: Time,
Agency, and Science, Chicago 1995; and Annemarie Mol and John Law: Regions, Net-
works and Fluids: Anaemia and Social Topology, in: Social Studies of Science 24/4 (1994),
pp.  641–671.
4 Peter Dear: Science Studies as Epistemography, in: Jay Labinger and Harry Collins (eds.):
The One Culture? A Conversation about Science, Chicago 2001, pp.  128–141.

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focus, much like ›biography‹ or ›geography.‹ It designates an enterprise centrally con-

cerned with developing an empirical understanding of scientific knowledge, in contrast to
epistemology, which is a prescriptive study of how knowledge can or should be made.« 5

Dear adds in a footnote that »[t]he suffix ›-ography‹ should not be taken to indicate
anything more specific than ›description‹ in the widest sense; it need not imply
spatial description (akin to ›cartography‹), for example, although it could well do
so in particular cases.« 6 The suffix also resonates with the ethnographies of labora-
tory and field science that made important contributions to science studies in the
1980s and afterwards, and also with a particular understanding of historiography.
As usually understood, historiography is the study of methods of historical writing,
but epistemography turns attention to the performative ›writing‹ of history enacted
by historical actors. This is not writing about history, though it could include such
writing; instead, it refers to the writings (and practices) of natural philosophers
and scientists that constitute the historical record.
The contrast to epistemology is especially clear when we consider the highly
influential (in public discourse, if no longer in philosophy of science) writings of
Sir Karl Popper. Dear points out that Popper not only formulates methodologi-
cal recommendations, he loads those recommendations with moral and political
significance. Popper’s demarcation criterion of falsifiability, for example, lends
itself to being applied well beyond the philosophy of science as a basis for political
reform.7 Falsifiability, according to Popper, allows a critical analyst to distinguish
between ›confirming‹ the doctrines of a pseudoscience and successfully contrib-
uting to the progress of genuine science. For Popper, the robust popularity of a
doctrine or belief system is no measure of its scientific value. Popper’s negative
examples (Freudian and Adlerian psychoanalytic theory; the Marxist theory of
history) have been highly influential and can be said to have had long-lasting (if
mixed) success in public life as well as academia. Astrology and alchemy persisted
for thousands of years, despite (or, rather, because of ) their lack of falsifiability.
Even though Popper’s recommendations might seem to imply that neglecting fal-
sifiability will lead to failure, his negative examples indicate quite the opposite.
Belief systems that cannot be proved false may be sustained indefinitely, whereas
falsifiable theories are forever liable to be shot down. If one adds to the picture
the possibility of ›false refutation,‹ then the picture gets even darker. However, for
Popper, his demarcation criterion enables a wedge to be driven between popular
beliefs in and beyond academia and genuine (if tentative) knowledge.

5 Ibid., pp.  131–132.
6 Ibid., p.  131, n.
7 Karl S.  Popper: Conjectures and Refutations, London 1963.

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150 Michael Lynch

It is no accident that on the rare occasions when high courts invoke the philos-
ophy of science, the name of Popper tends to be cited (Edmond & Mercer, 2002).8
For example, in a key US Federal District Court Case, McLean v. Arkansas, the
judge (William Overton) ruled against the Arkansas state legislature’s attempt to
provide equal time for the teaching of »creation science« (a secularized version
of the creation story in the Book of Genesis) whenever the Darwinian theory of
evolution was taught in public (state supported) school science classes.9 One basis
for ruling that creation science was a religious doctrine masquerading as a science
was a list of »essential characteristics of science,« one of which was that genuine
science was »falsifiable.« Judge Overton’s ruling cited philosopher of biology Mi-
chael Ruse, an expert witness in the case who testified that creation science was
unfalsifiable.10 Ruse was criticized by other philosophers for promoting Popper’s
demarcation criterion, which by then had been rejected by many philosophers of
science, and for confusing the issue as to why creation science should be rejected.11
Laudan argued that many of the doctrines of creation science were falsifiable, and
in fact false, and that Darwin’s theory, when taken as a whole, was unfalsifiable
but highly credible and unquestionably scientific.12
Another US Supreme Court case in which Popper’s demarcation criterion was
invoked concerned the question of how courts should rule on the admissibility
of expert testimony. In the landmark Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals case,
the court reviewed competing standards for admitting scientific and technical
evidence.13 (Admissibility refers to judicial allowance for specific evidence to be
presented in a trial court.) The court received amicus curiae briefs from a number
of STS scholars and philosophers of science on questions pertaining to the criteria
for counting a domain of practice as »scientific.« Once again, the issue of falsifi-
ability (more broadly construed in connection with »testability«) was cited as an
important consideration. And, once again, Popper was mentioned as an authority

  8 See Gary Edmond and David Mercer: Conjectures and Exhumations: Citations of His-
tory, Philosophy and Sociology of Science in U.S.  Federal Courts, in: Law & Litera-
ture 14 (2002), pp.  309–366.
  9 McLean v. Arkansas (529 F. Supp. ED Ark. 1982).
10 Michael Ruse: Response to the Commentary: Pro Judice, in: Science, Technology, &
Human Values 7/41 (1982), pp.  19–23; Michael Ruse: Commentary: The Academic as
Expert Witness: in Science, Technology, & Human Values 11/2 (1986), pp.  68–73.
11 For criticisms of Ruse’s testimony, see Larry Laudan: Science at the Bar: Causes for Con-
cern, in: Science, Technology, & Human Values 7/41 (1982), pp.  16–19; Philip Quinn:
The Philosopher as Expert Witness, in: J. T. Cushing, C. F. Delaney, and G. Gutting
(eds.): Science and Reality: Recent Work in the Philosophy of Science. Notre Dame,
IN 1984, pp.  32–53.
12 Ibid., p.  16.
13 Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals (509 U.S.  579, 1993).

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on the subject, and once again some philosophers criticized the court’s citation of
Popper as irrelevant and misguided.14
Rather than try to take up the philosophical challenge to specify criteria for
demarcating science from non-science, a different project is possible for social-his-
torians and sociologists, which is to treat debates about such matters descrip-
tively, as themselves phenomena of interest. This perspective is concisely articulated
by Thomas Gieryn under the theme of »boundary work.«15 Gieryn points out
that »[e] ven as sociologists and philosophers argue over the uniqueness of science
among intellectual activities, demarcation is routinely accomplished in practical,
everyday settings.«16 An effort to describe boundary work makes no initial com-
mitment to whether or not, and if so how, such boundaries should be drawn in
general or in any specific case. In line with Dear’s conception of epistemography,
the task is a descriptive one: to provide documentary accounts of how courts of
law and other institutionally embedded agencies constitute epistemic boundaries
in particular cases.
Such a descriptive project contrasts to normative approaches to epistemology.
Dear’s epistemography is ›conservative‹ in the sense that it does not critique the
practical and historical circumstances in which epistemological categories and
distinctions are invoked, refashioned, and instituted. In another sense, however,
epistemography is radical in the way it resists the demand to posit (or presuppose)
historically and culturally transcendent grounds of inference and action. It is an
explicitly relativistic approach, but the relativism is a restricted version that is com-
patible with making local judgments about what is, was, and can be taken as real
and true. (How else could it be descriptive?) Such local judgments are contingent,
and do not propose any general formula or argument that would provide a stable
basis for making discriminations between true and false knowledge.17 Moreover,
epistemographic investigations would not necessarily provide general, historically
stable, criteria for certifying knowledge. Dear’s epistemography also is broadly
compatible with an ethnomethodological »respecification« of key methodological
and epistemological topics. Both approaches refuse the epistemic privilege so often
assigned to, or presumed by, the ›professional analyst‹ to specify the real reasons,

14 See, for example, Susan Haack: Trial and Error: The Supreme Court’s Philosophy of
Science, in: American Journal of Public Health 95/S1 (2005), pp.  S.  66–73.
15 Thomas Gieryn: Boundary-work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-science, in:
American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 781–795.
16 Ibid., p.  781.
17 In this respect, epistemography is consistent with the Strong Programme in the Sociology
of Scientific Knowledge, as espoused by David Bloor: Knowledge and Social Imagery.
London 1976, p.  6.

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152 Michael Lynch

motives, and social circumstances that supposedly drive situated actions.18 Re-
current topics associated with epistemology—and, not incidentally, social science
methodology—become situated phenomena to be described in circumstantial de-
tail rather than posited as generalized schema. In studies of scientific practices,
such topics include observation, representation, coding, classification, measure-
ment, analysis, and the reproduction of findings. Along these lines, Christian
Greiffenhagen, Michael Mair, and Wes Sharrock introduce another ›graphy‹ term,
methodography, that would describe the ›on the ground‹ performance of methodo-
logical practices in social science.19
Epistemography, as I understand it, is not a branch of philosophy, though it
reacts to and selectively addresses topics that often are central to philosophical
investigations. Philosopher Peter Winch in his landmark The Idea of a Social Sci-
ence, argued that studies of human actions cannot be scientific in the same sense as
studies of non-human phenomena, because social science descriptions and expla-
nations employ concepts of a »second order« that are drawn from, and intelligible
in terms of, the vernacular language that constitutes the phenomenal fields that
social scientists study.20 Winch recommended that, instead of supposing that they
are characterizing and explaining previously unknown objects in, and properties
of, the world, social scientists (or rather social philosophers) should recognize that
they are engaged in an epistemological project. Accordingly, they should seek to
explicate rather than explain the conceptual and discursive constitution of social
actions. Epistemography proceeds from such a recommendation by rejecting arm-
chair inquiry and the philosophical baggage of epistemology, undertaking instead
to compose historical and ethnographic descriptions of particular historical pro-
ductions and contemporary cases. I once used the term »epistopic« to bring into
relief the way topics of epistemology were subject to respecification in specific
case studies.21 Examples of such topics and studies that respecified them as contin-
gent social-historical productions are »matters of fact«; replication of experiments;
observation; perception; objectivity; pluralized and located »knowledges«, and

18 See Harold Garfinkel: Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working out Durkheim’s Apho-

rism, Lanham, MD, 2002; and Graham Button (ed.): Ethnomethodology and the Human
Sciences, Cambridge 1991.
19 Christian Greiffenhagen, Michael Mair and Wes Sharrock: From Methodology to Me-
thodography: A Study of Qualitative and Quantitative Reasoning in Practice, in Metho-
dological Innovations Online 6/3 (2011), pp.  93–107, available at http://journals.sagepub.
com/doi/pdf/10.4256/mio.2011.009 (30. 01. 2019).
20 Peter Winch: The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (1958), London
1990.
21 Michael Lynch: Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and Social
Studies of Science, Cambridge 1993, pp.  275 ff.

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representation.22 It is notable that many of these studies were done decades ago, at
a time when the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) was still forming
and becoming institutionalized. Currently, the field has a relatively stable and ex-
panding literature, professional associations, journals, and so forth, which provide
a recognized organizational identity. Normative and politicized approaches are
now in the ascendency, though they are not necessarily incompatible with the
descriptive approach.

2.  From Epistemography to Ontography

Like epistemology, ontology carries the baggage of metaphysics. Indeed, the

very distinction between epistemology and ontology imposes a classical distinc-
tion upon inquiry into what Latour dubs »modes of existence.« 23 Karen Barad
hyphenates »onto-epistemology« in order to signal a refusal to separate being
from discourse, and agency from materiality.24 This refusal to impose a stable de-
marcation sets up Barad’s effort to elucidate the particular ›cuts‹ between agency
and reality that are imposed in particular cultural and historical circumstances.25
If we take seriously the refusal to assign ontology to a broad domain of things-
as-such, and epistemology to the human historical project of knowing the world,

22 On matters of fact, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer: Leviathan and the Air Pump,
Princeton 1985; on replication, see H. M. Collins: Changing Order: Replication and
Induction in Scientific Practice. London 1985; on observation, see Trevor Pinch: Towards
an Analysis of Scientific Observation: The Externality and Evidential Significance of
Observational Reports in Physics, in Social Studies of Science 15/1 (1985), pp.  3–36; on
perception, see Jeff Coulter and E. D. Parsons: The Praxiology of Perception: Visual
Orientations and Practical Action, in: Inquiry 33 (1991), pp.  251–272; on objectivity, see
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison: Objectivity, Brooklyn, NY 2007; on knowledges,
see Donna Haraway: Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism as a Site
of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective, in: Feminist Studies 14/3 (1988),
pp.  575–599; on representation, see Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (eds.): Represen-
tation in Scientific Practice, Cambridge, MA 1990; and Catelijne Coopmans, Janet Ver-
tesi, Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (eds.): Representation in Scientific Practice
­Revisited, Cambridge, MA 2015.
23 Latour: An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (as note 3).
24 Karen Barad: Agential Realism: Feminist Interventions in Understanding Scientific
Practices, in: Mario Biagioli (ed.): The Science Studies Reader, New York, NY 1999,
pp.  1–11.
25 See Latour: Science in Action (as note 3), and Pickering: The Mangle of Practice (as note
3) for efforts to avoid preferentially assigning agency to humans and materiality to non-
human entities, and Hans-Jorg Rheinberger: Toward a History of Epistemic Things:
Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube, Stanford, CA 1997, for a hybrid conception of
»epistemic things.«

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154 Michael Lynch

then the »turn to ontology« would turn full-circle, returning to the phenomenal
fields in which knowing and what is known are grammatically and materially in-
separable and only provisionally differentiated. This would not be a turn back to
epistemology, but rather to a primordial being-in-the-world from which innu-
merable distinctions spin out. Consequently, ontography would occupy the same
initial standpoint (or standpoints) as epistemography. Studies of the production and
use of evidence, disputes about matters of fact, and descriptions of the technologies
and networks through which data, facts, and metrics are disseminated, would be no
more ontological than they ever were epistemological. Ontography would not be
an inquiry into things as such, any more than epistemography is an inquiry into
ideas. And, if we throw ethics into the picture, we have a more elaborate nexus
of implications: epistemography would invariably cross over into ontography, and
both would involve ethical considerations (spurring investigators to engage in
›ethigraphy‹ (or, perhaps, ›ethicography‹) as well.26
Appending the -ography suffix to a root word previously appended by -ology
does not always produce a predictable derivation, but following the example of
epistemography, my conception of ontography is intended to cover investigations
that aim to describe the contingent and organizationally embedded work of social
agents to propose, inscribe, or dispute particular ontological matters. In both epis-
temography and ontography, the aim is not to transcend the particular discursive
fields but to characterize their practical operations. Such characterizations cannot
transcend our vernacular usage, however broadly or narrowly ›we‹ conceive of ›us,‹
and regardless of how much or how little technical language such characteriza-
tions deploy. A possibility that arises from such characterizations is that they will
not trace back to metaphysics, but will instead float in a sea of ordinary language
in which conceptual distinctions and variations in usage abound. Granting the
ultimate intertwining of subjects with objects, concepts with observations, values
with facts, and knowledge with what the knowledge is of, the question is whether
ontography would provide a relatively distinct descriptive shading when compared
with epistemography.
It may be preferable for the time being to leave this question unanswered. If
we take, for example, matters of fact as a topic, we might suppose that such facts
clearly are ontological matters. But, once we begin to look into the matter, it gets
more complicated. For Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg, a physical law is like a
rock in the field: »we did not create the laws of physics or the rocks in the field,

26 On ›ethigraphy‹ see Michael Lynch: The Epistemology of Epistopics: Science and Tech-
nology Studies as an Emergent (Non)discipline, in: American Sociological Association,
Science, Knowledge & Technology Section (ASA-SKAT) Newsletter (Fall, 2001),
pp.  2 –3.

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and we sometimes unhappily find that we have been wrong about them, as when
we stub our toe on an unnoticed rock, or when we find we have made a mistake
(as most physicists have) about some physical law.« 27 But, for Ludwig Wittgenstein,
facts (and this would also apply to physical laws) are true propositions, necessarily
expressed in language (albeit in some cases mathematical symbols), and thus they
differ from things like rocks, which can neither be true nor false.28 One might
distinguish a real rock from a fake rock, such as one used as a prop for a theat-
rical production, but this distinction requires situational framing. Also, consider
such topics as »reality,« »raw data« (big or small), and »nature«. Are they on the
ontological side of the ledger, while ideas, interpretations, and linguistic expres-
sions are on the epistemological side? Initially, it might seem so, but very quickly
we can find it difficult and contentious to separate real reality from contestable
claims about what is real, and we may also find similar problems with distinc-
tions between data and interpretations, facts and values, and natural entities and
artifacts. Questions about such concepts and distinctions are not only of interest
to philosophers, as they also are subject to ethical, legal, and social disputes. For
example, with words similar to Weinberg’s, Chief Justice Phil Hardberger, of the
Texas Supreme Court, delivered the verdict in the case, Littleton v. Prange with
the pronouncement: »There are some things we cannot will into being. They just
are.« 29 Hardberger was referring to plaintiff Christie Littleton’s gender, insisting
that she had no right to inheritance as the spouse of her deceased husband, because
her status as a male at birth was a baseline fact that remained unchanged and ne-
gated the legality of her marriage under Texas law, despite changes in her name,
birth certificate, social-identity, and anatomy that Littleton had undergone since
her birth. Needless to say, Hard­berger’s immutable fact has proved to be more
mutable than he claimed.
Although Hardberger’s pronouncement invites spirited objections (and, indeed,
the ruling was a topic of dissent at the time for one of the three justices who
heard the case, and for long afterwards in legal and popular commentaries), an
ontographic account would examine and describe the social, historical, and legal
circumstances of such pronouncements. Similarly, ontographic consideration of
particular assertions about »raw data« and »what the data show,« would not begin
by contesting such assertions with counter-claims to the effect that there is no
such thing as raw data; instead, the aim would be to examine the practical and
polemical relations in which such usage is embedded.30 Nor would nature be de-

27 Steven Weinberg: Sokal’s Hoax, in: The New York Review of Books 63/13 (1996),
pp.  11–15.
28 Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), London 1961, Sec. 1.1.
29 Littleton v. Prange (9 S. W. 3d., 1999).
30 Compare to essays in Lisa Gitelman (ed.): Raw Data is an Oxymoron, Cambridge, MA 2013.

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156 Michael Lynch

clared dead on arrival, or claims about what is objective be dismissed as meaningless

or misleading. The initial problem would be to recover the intelligibility of such
ontological categories and distinctions based on how they are used in particular
settings, and to investigate the work they do in such settings.

3.  Artifacts and Natural Things

One widely employed ontological distinction is between artifacts and things

of nature. It is a distinction used in many natural sciences, and in an inverse way
in archaeology. A variant of that distinction also comes into play in law, particu-
larly in connection with intellectual property claims, and also in connection with
disputes in the USA concerning the question of whether the U.S.  Constitution
prohibits publicly funded schools from teaching creationist »theories« of life on
earth, or even presenting the secularized doctrines of »Intelligent Design« as a »sci-
entific« alternative to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Using a variant
of the argument from design used by Rev. William Paley in the early 19 th century,
proponents of Intelligent Design assign natural order to the handiwork of an un-
specified intelligent designer. According to such an assignment, there no longer
is a distinction between artifacts and natural things; instead, there is a distinction
between human-made artifacts and those designed by the transcendental agent.31
In many natural sciences, the ability to detect artifacts and to discriminate be-
tween artifacts and »natural« phenomena is a technical achievement. A close study
of how it is done in particular cases does not necessarily contribute to general
ontological definitions of how artificial kinds differ from natural kinds, but it can
be informative for how participants in various fields of science and law, as well
as in many other social practices, organize domains of discourse and praxis. That
distinction was featured in an ethnography I conducted decades ago in a neurosci-
ence laboratory which used electron microscopy and other techniques to examine
brain plasticity—in this case, rearrangements of neuronal organization following
a lesion to the mammalian brain (with laboratory rats being the most often used
animal model).32 At the time, there was a great deal of discussion and debate in sci-
ence studies about the »social construction« of scientific practices.33 Constructivist

31 The status of Intelligent Design as a scientific theory or religious doctrine was adjudica-
ted in a Federal District Court in Pennsylvania: Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School Board
(500 F. Supp. 2d 707 M.D. Pa., 2005).
32 Michael Lynch: Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science: A Study of Shop Talk and Shop
Work in a Research Laboratory, London 1985.
33 For examples and discussions of constructivist ethnographies, see, Bruno Latour and
Steve Woolgar: Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, London

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interpretations were readily (and some would say, deliberately) confused with the
vernacular distinction used in many scientific laboratories between provisionally
accepted »natural« features and those entities and evidential features consigned to
»artifacts« (akin to electromagnetic »noise« that interferes with the signal detected
by an instrument). After noting that archaeologists preferentially treat artifacts as
discoveries, while discarding the material that surrounds them, while electron
microscopists attempt to eliminate artifacts that intrude upon fields of anatomi-
cal features and sometimes can be mistaken for subcellular entities, I proposed to
conduct an »archaeology of artifacts«—what I would perhaps now dub an »archae-
ography of artifacts.« 34
For that study, I interviewed and recorded discussions among members of a
small team of researchers conducting an electron microscopic project, and paid
close attention to what they said about the artifacts they came across, and how they
handled those they noticed. I also familiarized myself with the visual materials,
technical language, and relevant background literature. I then developed a rough
typology of different artifacts and their consequences for the project at hand. Some
were consigned to visual defects that marred the appearance of visual documents.
Such artifacts did not necessarily inhibit the analysis of the micrographs in which
they appeared, although the micrographs in which they were found would not be
selected for display in public presentations and published articles, since they would
expose the laboratory to negative assessments of the preparatory work that ren-
dered brain tissue into micrographic data. Other artifacts were assessed as poten-
tial sources of confusion with the subcellular anatomical entities under study, and
as ruining the specimen materials from usability as data. Although I did not use
the term »ontography« at the time, my study exemplified an effort to write about
particular deployments of an ontological distinction for practical and epistemic
purposes in an organized domain of activity.
In the very different field of intellectual property law (an area of law that often
has some connection to the sciences), a related distinction comes up. This is the
distinction between »products of nature« and »compositions of matter« in An-
glo-American patent law (similar distinctions also appear in other national and
international legal systems). The application of the distinction in particular cases
is highly consequential and also fraught with controversy. Patent examiners and
judges in the U.S., Canada, the E.U. and elsewhere do not fancy themselves to be
engaging in metaphysics when they make judgments about particular cases, but

1979; Karin Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay (eds.): Science Observed: Perspectives
on the Social Study of Science, London, UK / Beverly Hills, CA 1983.
34 Lynch: Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science (as note 32), pp.  81 ff.

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158 Michael Lynch

they perform ontological work and constitute ontological distinctions when they
examine patent applications and adjudicate disputes about patent claims.
Recent disputes about gene patents, culminating in a 2013 US Supreme Court
decision,35 make up a rich field of research on the diverse and subtle (and some-
times baffling) ways in which the product of nature / composition of matter dis-
tinction has been deployed. In addition, the parties to the cases that concerned
questions about genetic patents debated about the specific ontological question of
whether genetic sequences should be considered as chemicals or as information.36
Briefly, a scholarly consideration of a line of cases involving patent claims on
entities, such as adrenalin, plant fibers, genetically engineered organisms, and ge-
netic sequences is ontographical in the sense that it delves into the historically and
institutionally situated way agents decide the ontological status of living organ-
isms. Such questions invariably turn on judgments about identity and difference;
for example, on whether or not extracted genetic sequences used in test systems
are the same as ›native‹ DNA sequences. Court judgments about what an entity
is essentially are bound up in legal precedents, though they take into account ar-
guments by scientists, clinicians, and various stakeholders. The classifications and
judgments about relations of identity and difference are highly particular, and do
not constitute a stable, context-independent ontology. However, the very speci-
ficity of such judgments is highly informative for ontography.

5. Conclusion

In this paper, I suggested that ontography offers a way to re-specify the meta-
physical category of ontology for more localized investigations into specific social
and historical practices that inscribe or otherwise organize divisions among kinds
of things. This suggestion followed along the lines that Peter Dear had previ-
ously outlined would be the case for »epistemography«: it would be a descriptive
approach to historical and contemporary discourse and praxis in which topics

35 Association for Molecular Pathology, et al. v. United States Patent and Trademark Office, et al.,
(569 U.S.  576, 2013).
36 The case also is a relatively rare instance in which STS researchers who had written about
relevant historical and sociological issues submitted declarations which were featured in
the case. In the 2010 Federal District Court trial that preceded the Supreme Court deci-
sion. Shobita Parthasarathy and Myles Jackson wrote separate Declarations for the Fede-
ral District Court phase of the litigation: Association for Molecular Pathology, et al. v. Uni-
ted States Patent and Trademark Office, et al., US District Court, Southern District of NY
( July 2010).

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 Ontography as the Study of Locally Organized Ontologies 159

of epistemology are perspicuously featured.37 In an earlier article on the topic of

»ontography,« I mentioned that this approach would be »deflationary« in the way
it examined the pragmatic use of what Ian Hacking has called »elevator words«
(e. g., reality, representation, and other key philosophical terms) in specific or-
ganizational settings.38 The point of such an investigation would be to elucidate
how ›ontological‹ distinctions play a constitutive and consequential role in the
production of social and natural order. Examples I discussed in the present paper
are from the natural sciences and law, but there are many other possibilities. Per-
haps the most obvious domain that I have not discussed is the explicit technical
use of ontologies in computer and information science. Such usage invites ethno-
graphic investigation of how practitioners in those fields constitute »ontologies.«
Although such an investigation would necessarily take into account the technical
work involved in the fields studied, it would open up broader questions about the
organizational conditions and consequences of such work.
Two issues that remain to be discussed further are, first, whether or not »on-
tography« would differ substantially from »epistemography,« and whether it would
be limited to description. On the first question, my tentative answer is that there
would be no clear methodological (methodographic?) difference, but that the dis-
course and practice in a given case might highlight ontology as an explicit theme
(such as in computer and information science), or deploy an ontological distinc-
tion (such as the one I discussed between artifacts and natural phenomena) that
provides a point of leverage for disputes and decisions that become embedded as
findings and precedents in a domain. On the second question about the limits of
description, it is difficult to resist the call to conduct a normative and active en-
gagement in disputes studied, but my recommendation is to begin with a descrip-
tive orientation, in anticipation of gaining some original insight into contentions
about, for example, »facts« (and categories of »fact,« including the category of »fact«
itself ), before committing to a position about what the facts happen to be. This
differs from assuming that »we« are now living in a »post-fact« era, and it does not
relieve us of the responsibility for living in the world we find.39
Finally, an ontographic investigation would not embark on an ambitious pro-
ject of developing a novel ontology; one that would emancipate itself from the
subject-object dichotomy and various other binaries that hold modern Western

37 Dear: Science Studies as Epistemography (as note 4). On »perspicuous phenomena,« see
Garfinkel: Ethnomethodology’s Program (as note 18), p.  141.
38 For a discussion of the »deflationary« implications of ontography, see Lynch: Ontography
(as note 1), p.  452. On »elevator words,« see Ian Hacking: The Social Construction of
What? Cambridge, MA 1999, p.  22.
39 Michael Lynch: STS, Symmetry, and Post-truth, in: Social Studies of Science 47/4 (2017),
pp.  593–599.

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160 Michael Lynch

metaphysics in their grip. Instead, it would begin without assuming a common

metaphysical system that underlies an entire era or a massive and vaguely defined
region. This (presumed lack of ) assumption is likely to be disallowed by those of
us who insist that there is no escape from a ›deep state‹ of metaphysics. Faced with
such objections, I can only plea ignorance about such a ›deep state‹ and to confess
an inability to expose and reform its operations.

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