Ontology of Foucault and Beck

[Sheepdisease]

Hello, could you please tell me what sort of ontology you think is the basis of Foucault's panopticism and Beck's 'risk society'?

[Pyrotex]

hey there, "woolmange" :)

I'm very interested in ontology, though I admit to being very fuzzy on the concept. I was hoping you could tell me what "basic" or "elementary" ontology was all about. I'm a quick study, but my main interests lay over in the physics arena.

Pyro

[Sheepdisease]

Ontology is the starting point of all research, defined as 'the image of social reality upon which a theory is based'. Specifically, it regards the 'Claims and assumptions that are made about the nature of social reality, claims about what exists, what it looks like, what units make it up and how these unirs interact with each other', that which makes up our beliefs of 'what constitutes social reality' (Blaikie, 2002: p8).

[Pyrotex]

Fascinating. I think I understand that.

It sounds similar to something I picked up in my years in The Forum ("EST") -- that to have any effective power in relationships, one had to be able to discriminate between "what happened" and "the story about what happened". The former being very much ontology as you described it. Unfortunately, most people recall the "story" and think that is what really happened. This failure to distinguish between the two becomes the source of many social conflicts and personal dysfunctions.