CONCEPT
Ethico-Onto-Epistemology
Barad's integrative term for the recognition that ethics, ontology, and epistemology are not separate domains but entangled practices — mutually constituted through the same apparatuses.
Ethico-onto-epistemology is Barad's compact name for the philosophical stance that refuses to separate ethics (how we should act), ontology (what exists), and epistemology (how we know). The conventional division treats these as distinct domains studied by distinct sub-fields, each with its own methods and questions. Barad insists that they are entangled: how we know, what exists, and what we value are co-constituted through the same material-discursive practices, and attempts to address one without the others produce partial, distorting accounts. For the AI age, the framework requires that the design of AI systems be understood simultaneously as an ontological act (it produces the phenomena it engages), an epistemological act (it shapes what can be known), and an ethical act (it distributes response-ability and determines what comes to matter).
In The You On AI Field Guide
The division of philosophy into separate sub-fields — ethics, ontology, epistemology — is a relatively recent inheritance, reflecting the specialization of the academic disciplines in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Before that division hardened, major philosophical systems