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Ontological pluralism
In philosophy the branch called ontological pluralism is the doctrine that there are different ways or modes of being.[1] "There are numbers, fictional characters, impossible things, and holes. But, we don’t think these things all exist in the same sense as cars and human beings."[2][3]
It is common to refer to a film, novel or otherwise fictitious or virtual narrative as not being 'real'. Thus, the characters in the film or novel are not real, where the 'real world' is the everyday world in which we live. However, as authors are wont to say, fiction informs our concept of reality, and so has some kind of reality.[4][5]
In the sciences, theories are developed to explain observations, giving rise to specialized vocabularies with specific meanings in the context of a given theory. Thus, 'electron's exist in different senses in different theoretical contexts. The meanings of 'electron' in chemistry, in the Standard Model of particle physics, in electromagnetism are connected, but from a practical standpoint vary with context. Perhaps an even more striking example is the concept of 'temperature' which has a different definition in thermodynamics than in statistical mechanics: the two definitions can be related, but the concept has two logically distinct existences, one entirely macroscopic, the other at an atomic level.
Technically, ontological pluralism claims that an accurate description of reality uses multiple quantifiers (see below for more on this term) that do not range over a single domain.[1] A very brief outline of some technical terms is proved next to make this second description clearer.
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