Clay Shirky's newest piece on categories, links, and tags. Highly recommended. Great writing!
It comes down ultimately to a question of philosophy. Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world? If you believe the world makes sense, then anyone who tries to make sense of the world differently than you is presenting you with a situation that needs to be reconciled formally, because if you get it wrong, you're getting it wrong about the real world.
If, on the other hand, you believe that we make sense of the world, if we are, from a bunch of different points of view, applying some kind of sense to the world, then you don't privilege one top level of sense-making over the other. What you do instead is you try to find ways that the individual sense-making can roll up to something which is of value in aggregate, but you do it without an ontological goal. You do it without a goal of explicitly getting to or even closely matching some theoretically perfect view of the world.
My only issue with this is that he is taking a "there are two kinds of people" stance here, itself a form of ontology (putting things in little boxes). Shirky needs to realize there is great value in ontology AND "freelinking". Actually I have many issues with this... I'll have to respond to it when I have a moment.