system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What's the difference between "metaphysical" and "ontological" in contemporary usage? Do two things with the same ontological status necessarily have the same metaphysical status? What about the reverse?

To elaborate: If I make a claim like

>"there is no a priori ontological difference between what is human and what is not" 

what would be the difference in substituting "metaphysical" for "ontological"?

Or if I were to claim, 

>"logical possibility entails metaphysical possibility"

how is this different from if I had used "ontological" instead of "metaphysical"?



Thanks dudes!
gpt
Metaphysics is more general, ontology is more particular. Ontology is a branch of metaphysics. So something's ontological status is *part of* its metaphysical status. But ontology doesn't exhaust metaphysics. For instance, another branch of metaphysics is mereology, being the study of the relationship between parts and wholes. Consider the ontological status of the City of Gold with its mereology. The City of Gold, presumably, is made up of a whole bunch of city part make of gold--some mixture of golden buildings, golden streets, golden pavements, golden lamp posts, and so on. The city is the whole made up of a bunch if city parts, and this is a metaphysical fact about the City of Gold, where it to exist. But all of that happens independently of whether the City of Gold exists, that is, its ontological status. That's an example of how there is parts of something's metaphysical status which is not part of its ontological status.