 A dominant contemporary view of metaphysics is that its subject matter is that of fundamental reality, the task of metaphysics being, in Plato’s words, to “carve nature at its joints”. If the subject matter of metaphysics is fundamental reality, then natural language ontology will have no place in it. There is another view of metaphysics, however, on which metaphysics, at least in part, has as its subject matter the general nature of things as reflected in a particular range of “data”. Those data may consist in intuitions, experiences (as in phenomenology), or in linguistic intuitions about the acceptability, truth conditions, and inferential relations of natural language sentences (natural language ontology). On such an approach to metaphysics, it is left open what such data may reflect, whether it is reality in one sense or another, a realm of actual but derivative entities, entities constituted by the experience itself, or a realm of conceived reality. Older traditions of metaphysics that fall under the approach include the Kantian tradition, which deals, for example, with ontological categories, but as preconditions of accessing the world, rather than as categories of how things really are, as well as the phenomenological tradition (Brentano, Husserl, Ingarden), where ontology was also pursued, but based on how things appear (or are constituted by appearance), rather than assumptions about a mind-independent reality.