ONTOLOGY
What is ontology?
Ontology is concerned with the question "What does reality consist of?" The word 'ontology' is derived from the Greek word for 'exist,' 'is,' etc. Ontology is concerned with questions about existence and being. What kinds of things can be said to exist? What does it mean to say that something exists? Are there different senses of the verb 'to exist", different types of existence? (A.W. Sparkes, TALKING PHILOSOPHY).
It turns out that the answers that are provided to ontological questions fall into three types of approaches: (1) materialism - the belief that only things that have physical substance are real; (2) idealism - the belief that reality consists of the concepts that underlie the facts of experience; (3) behaviorism - the belief that reality consists of how things (including people) behave. To avoid getting stuck in "ontological fundamentalism" use all three views on beliefs about reality.
How does ontology operate?
Although some people may claim to be predominantly or exclusively convinced of one or another of these ontologies, in practice they will blend these archetypes, much as in epistemology. Materialists will try to find the physical basis for any and all of the phenomena of interest to them. So instead of accepting the terminology of conventional psychology for human behavior, they will look for genetic or physiological explanations. And if they look hard enough, or are patient enough, they will find (or discover) such explanations, because for "materialist true believers" this approach is the only credible one.
Idealists discern a "deeper reality" beneath the facts and foibles of experience, because appearances are so changeable, but their concept of reality is "changeless". Plato saw ideal "forms" as the basis of mundane experience, while Noam Chomsky sees cognitive structures behind human language capabilities, and Claude Levi-Strauss finds kinship templates governing all human cultures.
Behaviorists see human reality (the baseline for them) as consisting of the accumulated habits and traditions whereby societies condition people. The mechanism of "classical conditioning" consists of associations that are built up between reinforcing stimuli and subsequently acquired routines. The other mechanism is "operant conditioning", wherein behavior is shaped through a combination of (a) positive reinforcement of emergent behaviors that are acceptable, (b) negative reinforcement (benign neglect) of neutral behaviors, and (c) aversive reinforcement of unacceptable behaviors (discouragement). The rationale behind this approach is that reality is a human construct, so reality consists of how humans behave.
References
A.W. Sparkes
TALKING PHILOSOPHY
Routledge, London, 1991