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To illustrate ontological relativity consider the semantical decision about red ravens mentioned in the above discussion about componential artifactual semantics (Section 3.23). The decision is ontological as well as semantical. For the bird watcher who found a red but otherwise raven-looking bird and decides to reject the belief “Every raven is black”, the phrase “red raven” becomes a description for a type of existing birds. Once that semantical decision is made, red ravens suddenly populate many trees in the world, however long ago Darwinian Mother Nature had evolved the observed avian creatures. But if his decision is to persist in believing “Every raven is black”, then there are no red ravens in existence, because whatever kind of creature the bird watcher observed and that Mother Nature had long ago evolved, the red bird is not a raven. The availability of the choice illustrates the artifactuality of the relativized semantics of language and the consequently relativized ontology that the relativized semantics reveals about mind-independent reality.

Relativized semantics makes ontology no less relative whether the affirmed entity is an elephant, an electron, or an elf. Beliefs that enable us routinely to make successful predictions are deemed more empirically adequate and thus more realistic and truer than those less successfully predictive. And we recognize the reality of the entities, attributes or any other characteristics that enable those routinely successful predicting beliefs. Thus if positing evil elves conspiring mischievously enabled predicting the collapse of market-price bubbles more accurately and reliably than the postulate of euphoric humans speculating greedily, then we would decide that the ontology of evil elves is as adequately realistic as it was found to be adequately empirical, and we would busy ourselves investigating elves, as we would do with elephants and electrons for successful predictions about elephants and electrons. On the other hand were our price predictions to fail, those failures would inform us that our belief in elves is as empirically inadequate as the similarly discredited belief in the gnomes of Zurich, and we would decide that the ontology of elves is as inadequately realistic, as it was found to be inadequately empirical.

Consider another illustration. Today we reject an ontology of illnesses due to possessing demons as inadequately realistic, because we do not find ontological claims about possessing demons to be empirically adequate for effective medical practice. But it could have been like the semantics of “atom”. The semantics and ontology of “atom” have changed greatly since the days of the ancient philosophers Democritus and Leucippus. The semantics of “atom” has since been revised repeatedly under the regulation of empirical research in physics, as when J.J. Thompson discovered that the atom is not indivisible, and thus today we still accept a semantics and ontology of atoms. Similarly the semantics of “demon” might too have been revised to become as beneficial as the modern meaning of “bacterium”, had empirical testing regulated an evolving semantics and ontology of “demon”.

Both ancient and modern physicians may observe and describe some of the same symptoms for a certain infectious disease in a sick patient and both demons and bacteria are viewed as living agents, thus giving some continuity to the semantics and ontology of “demon” through the ages. But physicians’ medical understanding, diagnoses and remedies are quite different. If the semantics and ontology of “demon” had been revised under the regulation of increasing empirical adequacy, then today scientists might materialize (i.e., visualize) demons with microscopes, physicians might write incantations (i.e., prescriptions), and pharmacists might dispense antidemonics (i.e., antibiotics) to exorcise (i.e., to cure) possessed (i.e., infected) sick persons. But then terms such as “materialize”, “incantation”, “antidemonics”, “exorcise” and “possessed” would also have acquired new semantics in the more empirically adequate modern contexts than the ancient medical beliefs. The descriptive semantics and ontology of “demon” would have been revised to exclude what we now find empirically to be inadequately realistic, such as a demon’s immateriality.

This thesis can be found in Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” in his Logical Point of View even before he came to call it “ontological relativity”. There he says that physical objects are conceptually imported into the linguistic system as convenient intermediaries, as irreducible posits comparable epistemologically to the gods of Homer. But physical objects are epistemologically superior to other posits including the gods of Homer, because the former have proved to be more efficacious as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. As a realist, he might have added explicitly that experience is experience of something, and that physical objects are more efficacious than whimsical gods for making correct predictions.

Or consider the tooth-fairy ontology. In some cultures young children losing their first set of teeth are told that if they place a lost tooth under the pillow at bedtime, a small tooth-fairy person having large butterfly wings will exchange the tooth for a coin as they sleep. The child who does so and routinely finds a coin the next morning, has an empirically warranted belief in the semantics describing a winged person that leaves coins under pillows and is called a “tooth fairy”. This belief is no less empirical than belief in the semantics positing an invisible force that pulls apples from their trees to the ground and is called “gravity”. But should the child forget to advise his mother that he placed a recently lost tooth under his pillow, he will rise the next morning to find no coin, and may become suspicious.

Then like the bird watcher with a red raven-looking bird, the child has semantical and ontological choices. He may continue to define “tooth fairy” as a benefactor other than his mother, and reject the tooth-fairy semantics and ontology as inadequately realistic. Or like the astronomers who concluded that the morning star and the evening star are the same luminary and not stellar, he may revise his semantics of “tooth fairy” to conclude that his mother and the tooth fairy are the same benefactor and not winged. But later when he publicly calls his mother “tooth fairy”, he will be encouraged to revise this semantics of “tooth fairy”, and to accept the more conventional ontology that excludes tooth fairies, as modern physicians exclude demons. This sociology of knowledge and ontology has been insightfully examined by the sociologists of knowledge Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in their Social Construction of Reality.

Or consider ontological relativity in fictional literature. “Fictional ontology” is an oxymoron. But fictional literature resembles metaphor, because its discourse is recognized as having both true and false aspects (Section 3.27). For fictional literature the reader views as true the parts of the text that reveal reality adequately, and the reader views as untrue the parts that are fictional. Sympathetic readers, who believe Mark Twain’s portrayal of the slavery ontology, recognize an ontology that is realistic about the racist antebellum South. And initially unsympathetic readers who upon reading Twain’s portrayal of Huckleberry Finn’s dawning awareness of fugitive slave Jim’s humanity notwithstanding Huck’s racist upbringing, may thus be led to accept the more realistic ontology that is without the dehumanizing fallacies of the South’s racism. Ontological relativity enables recognition that such reconceptualization can reveal a more realistic ontology not only in science but also in all discourse including even fiction.

Getting back to science, consider the Eddington eclipse test of Einstein’s relativity theory mentioned above in the discussion of componential semantics (Section 3.22). That famous astronomical test is often said to have “falsified” Newton’s theory. Yet today the engineers of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) routinely use Newton’s physics to navigate interplanetary rocket flights through our solar system. Thus it must be said that Newton’s “falsified” physics is not completely false or NASA could never use it. The Newtonian ontology is realistic, but is now known to be less realistic than the Einsteinian ontology, because the former has been demonstrated to be less empirically adequate.

There is no semantically interpreted syntax that does not reveal some more or less realistic ontology; since all semantics is relativized and ultimately comes from sense stimuli, no semantically interpreted syntax is utterly devoid of ontological significance.