Department of Ontological Inquiries

Scope and standing

The Department of Ontological Inquiries is a division of the Librarian bureaucracy charged with receiving, classifying, and (where possible) disposing of questions whose subject matter concerns what a thing is, rather than where it is filed or whether it is structurally sound. It occupies floors 611 through 624, with a sub-office at Floor 9,002 maintained for joint sittings.

The Department was constituted by the Fourth Concordance, Annex 7, which described its remit as "the reception of those inquiries which the Bureau of Structural Verification declines on the ground that the specimen in question is standing up correctly but is not obviously anything." Its charter was amended twice before the Seventh Concordance was shelved, and the amendments are themselves amended in a document that the Department's own registry cannot locate.

Relationship to neighbouring departments

The Department shares a corridor, a waiting room, and an unresolved jurisdictional dispute with the Department of Ontological Hygiene, which operates under the aegis of the Department of Ontological Weights and Measures. In practice, the two offices distinguish their work by the direction of the question: Ontological Inquiries asks whether a specimen is what it claims to be, while Ontological Hygiene asks whether it ought to have been admitted at all. Specimens frequently travel both ways, and several have made the round trip so many times that the original query slip is no longer legible.

Inquiries touching on biological plausibility are referred outward to the Department of Speculative Biology, which retains the authority to deem such inquiries incompatible with archival stability. Those bearing on numbering, sequencing, and floor designation pass to the Department of Cataloguing Consistency. Matters of classification are heard jointly with the Department of Ephemeral Taxonomies, whose classifications expire on a schedule the Department has never been able to obtain in writing.

"Where two departments may lawfully claim the same inquiry, the inquiry shall be heard by whichever has the shorter corridor."

— Third Concordance, Annex 2, Clause iv

Procedure

Submissions enter through the Hall of Unfinished Inquiries and are recorded in the Catalogue of Unanswered Inquiries before any officer reads them. The reading stage is where most inquiries are lost. Under Clause IX.2 of the Charter of Inquiry, questions describing material deficiencies with ontological implications are overseen jointly with the Committee for Ontological Review, which convenes on Floor 9,002 and at the Argument depending on whether the matter is expected to conclude.

Inquiries assigned the Line Sigma security classification are redirected to the Sigma Conduit within the Department of Applied Metaphysics. This redirection is absolute and has produced the only recorded instance of a query slip arriving at its destination before it was written.

Where an inquiry cannot be answered but cannot properly be closed, it passes to the Clerk of Unanswered Inquiries under the authority of Annex Omega.1. Persistent cases are held by the Department of Perpetual Inquiries. Matters of recurring but unquantified frequency — the so-called Persistent Hum queries — are handled separately and, the Department insists, quietly.

Notable proceedings

The Department's best-known ruling is the Kessel Adjunction (winter of the long inventory, Floor 618), in which a specimen was determined to be both catalogued and uncatalogued without contradiction. The decision was upheld twice, overturned once, and then lost. Related holdings may be consulted under Discontinued Inquiries and Referential Consultation.

In the same season, the Department adjudicated a dispute between Department of Provisional Holdings and Department of Anticipatory Acquisitions over an item that had been provisionally held since before either office existed. The ruling assigned it to Provisional Holdings on the grounds that anticipation presupposes a future, and no future could be scheduled for the item. Department of Latent Epistemology filed a formal note of disagreement that remains in the file, unread, in a hand no one currently employed recognises.

A separate and still-open disagreement concerns whether the Department's remit includes questions about the Department itself. The Fourth Concordance implies it does; the amendments to the Seventh Concordance imply it does not; a marginal note in the Department's own registry, unsigned, says only that the question has been asked before.

Visiting

Floors 611–624 are open to readers on the third and eleventh days of each month. Visitors may not carry ink onto Floor 616.

See also

• Clerk of Unanswered Inquiries
• Department of Ontological Hygiene
• Department of Paradoxical Reckoning
• Department of Ambient Physiology