Pocket Ontologies

Ontology, in its classical sense, has always been a totalizing enterprise. From Aristotle’s categories to Hegel’s dialectic, from Heidegger’s Being to Quine’s ontological commitments, metaphysics wants to swallow the world whole. The question “what is” becomes the question “what must be,” and the answers arrive in sweeping systems that claim to account for everything.

But what if ontology could be smaller? What if, instead of the cathedral of Being, we carried with us small, provisional shrines?

A pocket ontology is just that: a miniature metaphysical model, a tool that explains enough without pretending to explain all. It is lossy by design. Like compression in information theory, it preserves what is necessary while discarding detail. Quine warned that mapping first-order objects (like pineapples) to second-order abstractions (like numbers) inevitably involves information loss. But perhaps loss is not failure—it is function. A pocket ontology is a blur sharp enough to act with.

Historically, many great systems of thought began as pockets. Parmenides’ claim that “what is, is” was not yet a system, but a small device that locked the mind into a logic of necessity. Heraclitus’ fragments—“you cannot step into the same river twice”—are pocket ontologies of change. Plato’s theory of Forms, for all its grandeur, begins as a portable opposition between appearance and reality. Each is a small mechanism that reorders thought, carried like a talisman.

Even in modern philosophy, the impulse toward compression is clear. Kant’s categories reduce experience into a table of functions. Wittgenstein’s early Tractatus condenses the world into propositions and facts, while his later Philosophical Investigations fractures language into games, each a pocket model of meaning. Derrida’s différance is not a system but a portable fracture, a small ontology of deferral that can be carried into any text.

Pocket ontologies resist the metaphysical impulse toward closure. They are not the One but the Many. They do not seek to legislate all of Being, but to provide miniature logics: tools, heuristics, scripts. They admit their own incompleteness. They blur categories and acknowledge the price of compression.

This is their danger and their promise. To mistake a pocket ontology for the whole is to weaponize distortion. History is full of categories that hardened into prisons: the binary of existence/non-existence, the opposition of male/female, the division of civilized/barbarian. Each began as a pocket, provisional and pragmatic. Each ossified into law.

Yet, to refuse pockets altogether is to abandon thought to vagueness. We cannot always wait for the cathedral; we must live with the shrine. Pockets allow us to think provisionally, to experiment with structures of meaning without requiring their permanence. They are portable metaphysics—temporary, lossy, yet sufficient.

Perhaps the true task of philosophy today is not to build one more system, but to curate pockets. To know that every category is a blur, every ontology a compression, every map partial. To make our models small enough to fit in a pocket, and light enough to be dropped when they fail.