Object-Oriented Ontology, OOO
Updated 2026-07-31
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
Object-oriented ontology, developed by Graham Harman, rejects human-centered accounts of reality. It holds that objects, whether hammers, stones or institutions, have a real existence that no human perception and no relation can fully capture. Objects interact with one another in networks that do not depend on human observers, and each object retains a hidden reserve never fully expressed in its relations. The position is philosophical rather than a method, and it flattens the usual hierarchy between human subjects and mere things.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Actor decentering: List every entity in a system, including non-human ones, as an actor with its own behavior. - Black-box respect: Assume each entity has internal states you cannot inspect and design around that limit. - Direct links: Let entities interact with each other instead of routing every exchange through a human.
Anchor fast decisions
If every entity has an inexhaustible hidden depth, then no single observer, and no single relation, can claim privileged access to what an object is. Relations between objects therefore have to be modeled as real in their own right, which removes the human from the center of the network. That shift changes what counts as a complete description: instead of asking what a thing means to us, you ask what it does with the other things it meets.
MINIMUM ACTION
In progress 0/1Practice this model in one real situation:
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Source support: Explicit
- criticaltheory.wikihttps://criticaltheory.wiki/articles/object-oriented-ontologyverified
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