In the metaphorical idea of a light pouring down from active intellect, there emerges the ontological idea that this intellect emanates forth the very form of the world.
(b) A characteristic difference between theory reduction and explanatory reduction stems from the fact that the former focusing on the epistemic notion of logical deduction does not incorporate explicitly the historically ubiquitous ontological idea that a reduction explains the whole in terms of its parts (see, e.g., Winther 2011).
As we have shown above, Mally's logical as well as ontological ideas, concepts and theories are still being discussed in contemporary philosophical research.
Our taking use of complexity is in line with Larsen-Freeman's term of meta-theory as it is a collection of knowing principles (i.e., epistemological ideas) and reality-consistent principles (i.e., ontological ideas) within what the object theories are put into practice in applied linguistics (de Bot et al., 2013).
In each case a primary resource was the foundational metaphysical and ontological "unit idea" of a hierarchical Great Chain of Being (Lovejoy 1964) on which each race was believed to have a fixed and determining place.
Another, directly related, difficulty had to do with the ontological status of ideas: do ideas have any reality apart from God?
Contrary to the ontological argument, whatever idea of God we are able to frame, it is an idea of something that we can conceive as either existing or not existing.
This debate concerns, fundamentally, the ontological status of ideas, and how far ideas can guarantee a correspondence to reality external to thought.
Classical thinkers could disagree about the actual ontological status of ideas (their formal reality); but they all had to agree that as representations (epistemically, if not ontologically) they were "non-physical" and "non-historical"; that is, precisely as representing their objects, they could not be conceived as having any role in the causal networks of the natural or the human worlds.
Consider the idea that ontological dependence could be reflexive: there is nothing in theory that rules out a relation of ontological dependence obtaining in such a way that a given object is dependent on itself.
In fact, unlike the idea of ontological reduction, methodological reductionism can be quite controversial.
