Words like "existence" and "real" have stalled philosophical progress. A pragmatic alternative offers a way forward: grounding our concepts in their consequences for action. By adopting the word "actual" to describe anything that affects how we act, we can sidestep intractable metaphysical debates and begin formalizing the domains that matter most.

The Problem with "Existence"

Ask a room of philosophers whether numbers exist, and you will get a lively debate that produces no actionable conclusion. The Platonic realist will insist that numbers have a mind-independent, objective existence in an abstract realm. The nominalist will deny this, arguing that numbers are merely names we assign to patterns. The conceptualist will split the difference and say numbers exist, but only as constructs of the mind. Each position is internally coherent. When applied in this way, none of them help you build anything.

This is not an isolated case. The same paralysis afflicts nearly every foundational question in analytic philosophy. Do universals exist? Are minds reducible to matter? Is there objective moral truth? Ask any of these questions and you will find multiple internally consistent positions, centuries of careful argumentation, and no resolution.

Meanwhile, the practical work of organizing human knowledge has largely moved on without philosophy's help. Formal ontology—the discipline of building rigorous, logically structured vocabularies for classifying and reasoning about things—has made genuine progress in domains like biomedicine, finance, and defense. These systems succeed not by resolving the metaphysical debates, but by sidestepping them entirely. They define categories that are useful for organizing data and reasoning about it, and they move on. But analytic philosophy has not followed their lead. The fields that most need philosophical clarity, like political discourse, ethics, and the social implications of transformative technologies like AI, remain as muddled as ever. And the formal tools that do exist were not designed to accommodate the kind of ontological pluralism these domains demand. They require broad consensus on the definitions of the concepts in their domain and lack the flexibility to support the full range of perspectives and disagreements that characterize public life.

What Pragmatism Got Right

I am not an academic philosopher, and I do not claim a comprehensive understanding of the pragmatist literature. But the core insight I want to draw on is straightforward, and it is not mine. The pragmatic tradition in philosophy, pioneered by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James in the late 19th century, identified the problem I am describing well over a hundred years ago.

Peirce's pragmatic maxim offers a deceptively simple test: to understand the meaning of a concept, consider what practical consequences would follow from its truth. If no practical consequences follow, the concept is empty. If two hypotheses produce no difference in any conceivable experience, then the dispute between them is meaningless. William James extended this insight more broadly: "Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest."¹ Their value is measured by how well they enable us to predict what we will experience, not by whether they correspond to some inaccessible metaphysical reality.

What the pragmatists recognized is something that should be obvious: concepts that don't connect to action aren't worth fighting over. If the question "Do numbers really exist?" has no conceivable bearing on what anyone would do differently, then the question itself is malformed. This does not mean numbers are unimportant. It means that "existence" is the wrong lens through which to evaluate their importance.

The point here is not that this idea is novel. It is that we need to be pragmatic if we hope to use logic as a tool to improve our lives in the time we live in. I am not proposing a new theory. I am arguing that this kind of approach is what is needed if philosophy is going to be effective in the domains where it is most urgently required.

A Proposal: The Word "Actual"

I propose we adopt the word "actual" to do the work that "exists" and "real" have failed to do. Specifically: something is actual if and only if it affects your actions.

This is not merely a semantic preference. The word "actual" carries exactly the right etymological baggage. It descends from the Latin actualis, meaning "pertaining to action," from actus, meaning "a doing, a driving, a setting in motion." The connection between "actual" and "action" is not a metaphor I am imposing; it is the original meaning of the word, waiting to be reclaimed.

Under this framing, the debates that have consumed analytic philosophy dissolve into clarity:

Do numbers actually matter? Under the actuality framing, this question becomes tractable. Rather than asking whether numbers inhabit some abstract realm, we ask whether they affect how a given agent acts. For an engineer designing a bridge, the answer is obviously yes: numerical relationships constrain every decision she makes. The metaphysical status of those numbers is irrelevant to their role in the engineer's work. Actuality, under this definition, is relative to the agent and their context. This is not a deficiency; it is a feature. It means we do not need to resolve the universal metaphysical status of numbers before we can formalize how they function in a given domain.

Do moral facts actually matter? If your ethical commitments affect how you treat people, then yes. Those commitments are actual for you, regardless of whether a philosopher in a seminar room can prove their mind-independent existence.

The key insight is that actuality is defined from the perspective of the agent making the claim. Different agents will reasonably disagree about what is actual, and that is fine. What matters is that each agent's commitments are explicit, transparent, and available for examination. The disagreements become productive because they are no longer about the hidden structure of reality. They are about differing practical commitments that can be compared, challenged, and revised.

This is not subjectivism. An agent who claims something is actual is not insulated from challenge — they are exposing their commitments to formal scrutiny. If those commitments are internally contradictory, or if they entail consequences the agent did not intend, the logic makes that visible. You are free to assert whatever axioms you like, but you are bound by what follows from them. The discipline comes not from metaphysical consensus but from logical accountability.

Formal Ontology Has Already Shown the Way

Adopting "actual" as a conceptual lens is one step toward making philosophy practical. But a better vocabulary alone is not enough. To make these ideas rigorous and scalable, we need formal tools. If this sounds too theoretical, consider that formal ontology has already been succeeding along these lines, just not in the public sphere.

Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), developed by Barry Smith and colleagues, is a top-level ontology that has become an ISO standard and is used across hundreds of biomedical research ontologies. The Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) provides a shared vocabulary for banks, investment firms, and regulatory agencies to exchange data. In January 2024, the U.S. Department of War and Intelligence Community adopted BFO and its extension, the Common Core Ontologies, as baseline standards for all ontology work across their agencies. These are not academic curiosities. When the Department of War selects a tool, it is because that tool works.

And these systems succeed precisely by adopting something like the pragmatic stance described above. BFO does not attempt to resolve whether universals have mind-independent existence. It defines categories (objects, processes, roles, dispositions, functions) that are useful for organizing data and reasoning about it. It distinguishes a disposition, which is grounded in an entity's physical makeup, like sugar's solubility, from a role, which is an extrinsic property arising from social or institutional circumstances, like a person's role as a nurse. This distinction carries genuine philosophical weight. But BFO does not pause to adjudicate the metaphysics. It proceeds because the distinction is useful, because getting it right affects how researchers, corporations, and the military classify and reason about their data.

But as described earlier, existing formal ontologies have significant limitations that prevent them from serving as the foundation for broader public discourse:

• There are many competing formal ontologies with limited interoperability. Some, like BFO, attempt to resolve this by focusing only on the upper levels of the ontology (the most general concepts), but even this approach has limitations, as consensus is difficult to reach on fundamental aspects like the treatment of time.
• Some concepts an ontology wishes to define are not agreed upon broadly, and traditional ontologies force these debates to occur outside of any formal system. Development of the shared ontology cannot continue until these disagreements are resolved.
• Existing formal ontologies result from careful upfront design, and the domain of ideas that can be expressed is predetermined before the ontology can be used. This leads to expensive revisions as real-world usage drifts from initial expectations.
• Most operate under a high-trust paradigm, where information is either accepted as completely reliable or excluded entirely, with no middle ground for the range of epistemic uncertainty characteristic of real-world discourse.

These systems are available to the public, but without the formal flexibility and ontological pluralism necessary to support the full range of debates people would like to engage in, they remain confined to institutional use.

Bridging the Gap

What is missing is infrastructure that brings the power of formal ontology to public discourse without requiring everyone to agree on a single ontology first. The historical failure of the Semantic Web teaches us that top-down consensus on what exists and how to categorize it does not scale. The approach must be bottom-up: give people the tools to formalize their own commitments, make those commitments transparent and logically verifiable, and let better formalizations win by being more useful.

This is the approach we are taking at Coherence Labs with Axiom. Rather than prescribing an ontology, Axiom provides a formal metaontological environment: a shared computational space where users define their own axioms, build their own ontological commitments, and subject them to logical verification. By operating at the meta level rather than the object level, it addresses the limitations described above directly.

Where ontologies compete with limited interoperability, Axiom makes individual ontologies part of a unified system. Interoperability becomes something users can work out on their own terms, without requiring top-down coordination. If you want to communicate with someone, you try to understand the concepts they express in terms that make sense to you. That fundamental nature of communication doesn't change, regardless of whether the communication medium is natural language or formal logic.

Where ontology systems force disagreements to be resolved outside any formal system before work can continue, Axiom allows those disagreements to occur within the formal system itself. Users assert their own axioms from their own perspectives, and others can build on, challenge, or adopt those assertions without anyone needing permission to proceed.

Where existing ontologies require careful upfront design with predetermined domains, leading to expensive revisions as usage drifts from expectations, Axiom allows users to modify and extend ontologies individually. Complex ontologies can evolve from simple working systems through iterative, user-driven development rather than committee-driven design.

Where most formal systems operate under a high-trust paradigm that treats information as either completely reliable or entirely excluded, Axiom's metaontological environment is expressive enough to capture epistemic uncertainty of various kinds. Users can employ whatever frameworks they find appropriate (Bayesian, frequentist, or otherwise) within their own axioms.

What it means to be "actual" is left deliberately open. Users assert what they consider actual through their own axioms, and the system requires agreement only on the rules of logic.

Conclusion

Progress on hard questions does not require solving metaphysics first. It requires making our assumptions explicit, reasoning about the consequences of those assumptions, and revising them when they prove inadequate. The pragmatic tradition understood this over a century ago. Formal ontology proved it could work in practice. What has been missing is the infrastructure to bring those tools to public life. That is what we are building with Axiom: putting the power of formal reasoning into the hands of anyone willing to make their thinking explicit.

The word "actual" is one piece of this larger effort: a terminological recommendation rather than a grand theory. But terminology matters. The words we use to frame our thinking constrain the thoughts that are feasible to have. "Existence" and "reality" invite us into debates about the hidden structure of things-in-themselves, debates that have produced centuries of sophisticated stalemate. "Actual" invites us to ask a different question: Does this affect how you act? If the answer is yes, then it warrants rigorous treatment, regardless of its metaphysical status. And if the answer is no, we are free to set it aside and focus on what does.

Footnotes

1. William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), Lecture II: "What Pragmatism Means." ↩