Ontological Reflections on Peace and War

Abstract

Responding to a provocative question by Hiroharu Seki about Hiroshima ontologies, this chapter reviews related thinking about the ontological primitives appropriate for event-data making, accessing high-performance knowledge bases, and modeling intelligent complex adaptive systems of use to researchers on war and peace. It cautions against “Cliocide,” defined as of the “silencing” or symbolic killing of collective historical-political or historical-disciplinary identities and identifying practices by historical or discipline deficient “scientific” coding practices. It proposes that more intelligent multi-agent models in the “complex, adaptive systems” tradition of the Santa Fe Institute should include the socially shared memories of nations and international societies, including their identity-redefining traumas and their relational/migrational/ecological histories of community-building success and failure. Historicity in an ontologically distinctive sense of the “time ordered self-understandings of a continuing human society” is still a challenge for the computationally oriented literature on war and peace.