Ontological Parity: Nothing Is More Real Than Anything Else

Lawrence Cahoone's ordinal naturalism, rooted in the metaphysics of Columbia naturalist Justus Buchler, executes a decisive shift in the framing of ontological inquiry. The fundamental question of metaphysics is reformulated from 'what is real?' to 'how is anything real?' — that is, in what order of relations, and through what modes of functioning, does something obtain? This is not a minor terminological adjustment but a structural transformation of the metaphysical enterprise itself.

Buchler's principle of ontological parity holds that nothing is more or less real than anything else. Unicorns are as real as horses; they simply obtain in different orders — literary history rather than biology. When someone declares that Santa Claus "isn't real," the more precise description is that Santa has been reassigned from the order of physical agency to the order of cultural-literary existence. Existence is not gained or lost; the relational context in which something functions is what shifts. Parity is not a claim about equal importance, utility, or causal efficacy — it is a claim about the illegitimacy of grading things by degrees of reality.

The philosophical payoff is substantial. A large class of traditional pseudo-problems — debates over the reality of abstract objects, fictional entities, social constructs, possibilities — dissolves once reality is no longer treated as a binary property. Instead, reality becomes relational, contextual, and always situated within specific orders of natural complexity. This positions ordinal naturalism as a genuinely post-foundationalist metaphysics that avoids both reductive physicalism and inflationary Platonism, offering a framework where the question is never whether something exists but always how and where it functions.