But isn't it in effect saying that no sentient being could have less contraints than me or a knowledge process that could have another epistemology?
Nope.
All it's saying is that, as far as I know, at best, such and such can be the case (or, more precisely:
should be the case, if their experience is similar to mine). You know as well as I that we do go about making epistemological assumption about other all the time. But that practice doesn't require any ontological assumptions beyond the obvious: that those others exist.
OK, but then you logic may not apply to reality.
I never assumed any 'reality'.
One can set up consistent logical systems that do not apply. Once you are claiming that it must apply everywhere....
Which we do all the time. Any mathematical system, for example, is such a claim. Nonetheless, it works. It works, because we define the entire system. With our phenomenological environment, we cannot do that.
Further I cannot see how there is no ontology. If all you are referring to is phenomenology - which to me seems like a category based on ideas about ontology - than you cannot know whether the ideas apply elsewhere.
Thus...an ontological assumption.
Here again, an ontological claim supported by empirical evidence.
Which is why it's not an ontological claim.
I can see why you'd like to think of it as such, but the mistake is in granting a different sort of ontological status to thought-objects; thought-objects are not ontological, they're epistemological. You seem to be operating on an old school dualism, where every possible thought must have a correlate "independent entity" (ontological object). As long as one restricts oneself to not making claims of such sort, we can freely speak of limitations, and thus, only the epistemological.
It seems to me that if you are extending your ideas to cover me - and everyone else on earth - 'know' must have to do with how 'things really are'.
Ideas about perception would have claims about ontology.
Ideas about all people would have claims about ontology.
Ideas based on one's memory and how well these ideas have worked for one 'before' are implicitly drawing conclusions about ontology.
To me there is a cake and eat it too argument going on here. Once you are making claims about what cannot be and what must be 'out there' you are making ontological claims. And we and others are 'out there' for you. I do not live inside your phenomenology, I assure you.
I think, further, that when working out this kind of argument, one must check in with built up images of how the world is. We cannot simply strip all the words of their semantics, this is not a symbolic logic argument. That sense of how the world is - for example - perception (which for example is based on the idea that all perception is over distance and who knows this may not be the case) - is a welter of ontological claims. While each assertion may be focusing elsewhere, it is a meaningless argument without all the ontological claims implicit in it.
See my comments above.
In analysis, there is little need for ontological assumptions (such as you're using the term). If, as above, you're going to introduce the necessity of an ontological factor in ideas, perception, et.al., then, as history has shown, you're going to have a rough time. If everything presumes some sort of ontological claim, then you're going to have to re-define what "ontological" means.
As it stands, it seems like you're interpreting "ontological" to necessarily mean something akin to "objective". But this is simply not the case; ontology refers not to what
is, but rather to an organizational scheme (in what follows, note the utter lack of "reality" or "objective"):
Philosophy Pages Dictionary:
Ontology
ontology
Branch of metaphysics concerned with identifying, in the most general terms, the kinds of things that actually exist. Thus, the "ontological commitments" of a philosophical position include both its explicit assertions and its implicit presuppositions about the existence of entities, substances, or beings of particular kinds.
Philosophical Dictionary:
Ontology
Ontology:
Study of what there is, in particular: Theory of the fundamental kinds of things there are.
These fundamental kinds have been called "categories" ever since Aristotle, who used the term in the sense of "most general predicates".
One basic ontology is natural realism.
Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy:
ontological commitment:
Commitment to the existence of something. According to Quine, we are ontologically committed to the values our variables must take in order for the properly regimented version of our theories to be true. It is also important to maintain a 'taste for desert landscapes', or in other words to conform to Ockham's razor, and avoiding inflating our ontologies.
We can make claims about what is, or is not 'out there', as long as we don't make use of ontological classification in the way in which you're using it. What's the ontological status of a fictive character?? This is precisely why we can indeed strip arguments down to their logical and semantical structure, and correctly make statements and conclusions.
As for comparing your and my differing phenomenological experience, of course we can only experience as we each do, but that doesn't mean that we cannot converse. It is the fact that we
can converse effectively that lends credence to the notion that, in any correct sense of the term "objective", it is we who determine what it is to be, and that it need not refer to any 'god's eye POV' notion that is both impossible to define, let alone to practice. "Objective" is a
result (ontologically speaking...).
