Ontologization as an Epistemic Basic Operation

This paper reconstructs ontologization not as a metaphysical claim about what exists, but as a fundamental epistemic operation. Ontologization is understood as a form of functional stabilization through which finite cognitive systems transform a dynamic field of experience into identifiable, re-accessible, and referentially available units of reference. In this sense, ontologization is a cross-domain achievement of cognition under finite conditions: it is not confined to one domain, although its concrete conditions of stability, validity, and revision are domain-specific. The paper argues that ontologization does not produce truth about an independent reality. Rather, it produces the stable forms of reference within which perception, memory, expectation, action, and later truth claims first become possible. The analysis traces this operation from individual cognition to intersubjective stabilization. The transition from individual to intersubjective ontologization is reconstructed through joint attention and shared reference, with declarative pointing treated as a paradigmatic marker at which this threshold becomes especially visible. Language is then analyzed as a secondary but powerful layer of fixation. It does not generate minimal ontologization from nothing, but condenses and extends already possible structures of reference, preserves them across situations, and changes their conditions of revision. Against this background, the paper defines the malfunction of ontologization as absolutization: the point at which functional posits are misunderstood as final descriptions of reality. Ontologization thus appears as a necessary condition of cognition, a constitutive operation of shared epistemic reality, and a structural source of epistemic entrenchment.