Hirsch used the term to broaden and expand on what William James discussed in his landmark 1907 work in epistemology, Pragmatism.
This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught.
One can choose to construct a hard or soft ontology, depending on the flexibility one intends to obtain.
It can be regarded as a subclass of ontologies as they are conceived of in computer science, in Gruber's terms (1993) as definitions of conceptualization.
Where conventional ontologies describe or interpret the conceptualization of a domain from a prioritized perspective, the soft ontology approach transfers the task of interpretation to the observer, user or learner, depending on the context.