How can something be natural?
Thus asking what is natural has the effect of presupposing that some distinction will be made between nature and artificial things. But no such divide exists in Nature, as every natural object is both an exemplification of a universal (such as “tree”) and manifesting these universals. This interpretation also leads to problems if you claim that only humans can make cultural distinctions within social groups concerning reality construction, but then again many other animals could potentially make social distinctions, for instance, those in monkey colonies. Could monkeys grant the reality of a single bush or do they recognize branches as countless individual bushes? So this interpretive ask can be misleading when you understand it to require "natural" so much that many things within Nature not shared with humans are deemed unnatural and non-real (or at least incorrectly interpreted).
So hearing "ontological naturalism", which would encompass ontology interacting with natural science, is a way of dealing with this issue.
This interpretation says that Nature includes much more than the collection of material objects expressed by current knowledge in biology or chemistry; it also encompasses human perceptions and epistemological systems themselves ("ontology") as well as all possible sentient animals inside one given environment having those coherent perceptual experiences (referred to here as "environment").
1. Ontological naturalism is a way of dealing with the problem of how something can be both natural and artificial.
2. Ontological naturalism includes ontology interacting with natural science.
3. Ontological naturalism encompasses human perceptions and epistemological systems as well as all possible sentient animals inside one given environment having those coherent perceptual experiences.
4. The problem of how something can be both natural and artificial is dealt with by specifying what natural objects (objects of nature) and artificial processes are in Nature.
5. The problem is constrained to exclude entities outside the particular environment as well as future ones from being excluded by default, e.g., by specifying that external things tracked over time would be part of reality, I .e., all worlds would have a single history with "time" added to it rather than independent histories without such an addition -- but see issues below.
I will start by establishing a couple of usages; people often have inconsistent definitions, and I don't want to correct them all. So in this very brief attempt at laying out these issues, it might be useful if they would be stated in outline form so that further clarification can follow as needed. Don't approach this paper hoping for an entirely rigorous definition or discussion -- the intent here is limited mostly to motivating some specific points through informal statements just to illustrate (I have also tried to keep my math and equations simple for the non-mathematicians included in this discussion; a different exposition would be required if these numbers were being strictly done out at all points).
1. Ontological naturalism entails that all the entities and processes in one's environment are part of reality, i.e., they exist as part of nature regardless of whether or not we cognitively perceive them as such
2. The problem with including future beings is that it remains uncertain what factors would render them "natural" for us to observe, let alone consider real
3. Epistemological naturalism entails the existence of fundamental knowledge of reality, independent from the cognitive process(es), and that we can use such basic knowledge to formulate theories about the makeup or operation of reality
4. John Searle's conception of "expectations about possible occurrences" does not stress what entities are to be expected (but see note 1) -- a problem it shares with other conceptions which do focus on expectations. In contrast, I call this feature contingent realism (CR).
Concepts like Searle's which do not make clear what entities to expect (or don't explicitly mention the presence of such concepts in one's environment or conceptual system -- absent only from view) are non-conjunctive and must be rejected as false. If entity "X" has never actually existed then we need no expectations about it by definition, i.e., until a past becomes an actual Contingent realism (CR) entails the existence of expectations about possible occurrences, but these expectations are contingent on certain factors which remain unknown. CR is a more parsimonious and realistic account of knowledge than ontological naturalism or epistemological naturalism, both of which posit a certain set of fundamental knowledge underlying our cognitive processes. CR acknowledges the fallibility and limitations of such cognitive processing.
So to clarify, ontological naturalism (the view that reality is independent of humans who can apprehend it):
Makes claims about what entities exist and may be expected in a human environment necessary conditions for asserting any entity's existence makes no reference to other factors which can render an entity "natural", i.e., not contingent on humans. Ontological naturalism does not make any claim about the nature and generation of entities, only that they exist in a certain form and are independent of experience by an individual human.
Epistemological naturalism (the view that truth values do not depend on observation or other cognitive authorities): Is committed to what existence claims can be established based upon some underlying set of facts, with no recognition for factors that negate knowledge e .g., the existence of what was once assumed to be a "natural" world, whose evolution can no longer be (safely) assumed.
Epistemological naturalism is thus quite unsatisfying as it and any claims which may rely on it inherit the same fallacy in earlier explanations for human knowledge; from David Hume's 'problem' where he imagined that we could never arrive at absolute truth or not subject to revision based upon observations or rational arguments which must be subject to exceptions and revision. Epistemological naturalism is thus committed to claims about the world based upon a fixed set of fundamentals from reason, perception, or observation – without any notion that rationality itself may fail at some point in time, fulfilling Hume's problem; i.e., when everything seems perfectly rational and observable but then we meet someone who challenges our infallible judgments (no matter how "rational" they appear), etc
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