International Relations. A self-Study Guide to Theory

particular. In short, ontology is the philosophy of being. The following are 
ontological questions: What is there? What is? What exists? What is reality 
made of? What are the most general features and relations of the things and 
entities? One example is the ontological claim that only material reality can 
be claimed to exist: the answer to the question “What is?” is “Matter only” 
(ontological materialism or materialism as an ontological claim). Another ex-
ample, concerning the relation of “things” to each other, is the classical onto-
logical problem of how a “universal” relates to a “particular”. This ontologi-
cal “problem” is certainly familiar to you as expressed by the question, “Is 
the whole more than the sum of its parts?” The query could be answered by 
an ontological individualist claim (the whole is always and only the sum of 
the single parts) or by an ontological holistic claim (the whole is more than 
the sum of its parts; it possesses a quality of its own that is not reducible to 
the properties of the single parts). 
So, in the philosophy of science, an ontological assumption refers to a set 
of things which have been claimed to exist. This is done by means of a par-
ticular theory or system of thought. We speak of the ontology of a theory. An 
example that already is familiar to you from the first unit is the assumption 
found in many IR theories as the starting point: that states are the basic 
“units” of the international system and that the international system is “made 
up” of sovereign states forming an anarchical structure. Remember what has 
been said above about the nature of assumptions: they serve as the starting 
points for the purpose of theory building. There are many influential theories 
of IR that begin at this starting point: the ontological claim about the interna-
tional system as made of the single states, perceived as the “units” or even 
unitary actors. However, as Unit 3 will demonstrate, even though assump-
tions are starting points that do not need to be proved as “true” or “false”, 
they are not “free” experiments of thought. Rather, assumptions are always 
embedded in and derived from broader, long-term persistent world views and 
thus reflect specific, culturally variable patterns of thought. As reflections of 
deeper “orders of thought”, assumptions are usually not subject to explicit 
explication in a theory of IR or even meta-theory. They instead fundamental-
ly shape our cognition and perception of the world. This truth pertains not on-
ly to gaining scientific knowledge but to gaining any knowledge. Hence as-
sumptions form part of any system of knowledge, not only science. We will 
come back to this principle later in more detail. 

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In sum, the term “ontology” deals with what-questions, or what there is to 
know.
Different from ontology is epistemology, which stems from the Greek 
word episteme (knowledge). Epistemology is the branch of philosophy con-
cerned with the theory of knowledge. In short, epistemology is the philosophy 
of knowledge or of how to come to know and of how we can know. Episte-
mological problems are the definition of knowledge, accounting for the 
sources and criteria of knowledge, determining the kinds of knowledge pos-
sible, the relation between the one who knows and the objects known, and the 
grounds that we have for accepting or rejecting knowledge. In other words, 
epistemology concerns itself with the criteria for what we perceive to be le-
gitimate or valid knowledge. An example is an epistemological claim called 
empiricism: the belief that we can only know what we can observe/ex-
perience by our senses and that there must be an empirical basis for our 
knowledge in order for that knowledge to count as valid.