A philosophical critique of the standard ontological use of the term otherness.

Abstract

Ontology theorists ex. gr. Taub (2008), Levinas (1999), and Ethics Ex. gr. Sartre (1998), use the term
"otherness" to refer, at least, to some of the following extensions: self-awareness; awareness of
what we are; knowledge of the self, how we describe and recognize ourselves. In such a way that
when we want to understand what the ontologist and the ethicist refer to when they express
"becoming aware of oneself", these theorists lead us to an exercise of "exploring ourselves from and
within ourselves". However, the report of this exploration faces the unobservability, to the lack of
public criteria that validate these reports related to how to know oneself.
What this means is that the ontologist's vision is linked to introspection, understood as the
most basic cognitive capacity that the self has to know itself. If so, there is a risk that the descriptions
of the self, seen as an exercise in self-awareness, only refer to cognitive reports or representations
that do not leave their cognitive bounding in the first person.
I will address this problem based on Wittgenstein's (2003) descriptivist proposal, which
points out that philosophical problems are problems of language use. As this proposal is a useful and
conducive philosophical tool for clarifying concepts, the ontologist could consider it for his work as
long as his purpose is to clarify the use of the term "otherness".