 Natural language ontology as a discipline whose subject matter is the ontology implicit in natural language is a developing discipline that, on the view adopted in this entry, is part of both metaphysics and natural language semantics. But in a way it has also been a practice throughout the history of philosophy. Throughout the history of philosophy, at times more often than others, natural language has been used as method for clarifying intuitions, that is, states of intellectual seeming that contrast, very roughly, with inferential belief, reasoning or reflection and that have been considered the primary evidence in philosophy (see entry on  intuition).  In particular, natural language has played an important role in clarifying intuitions that bear on metaphysical issues.