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A "group of physical objects" like a "collection of physical object" is by definition created by the act of grouping, by the act of collecting, according to a certain character possessed by its members which we call as a noun by 'group' or 'collection'. Think of them as verbs. The act of combining things is different from the things being combined. The problem is that we often call them with the same name:A collection is not an "intermittent being", it is an abstraction, and a collection that has no member is called "nothing"Peirce in 4.650 "[...] two apparent and highly interesting ornithological collections, the one of whatever phoenixes there ever were or will be, the other of whatever cockatrixes there are at this moment, are one and the same collection, having one and the same essential character. It is that quite unique collection that goes by the name of Nothing.
Some writers whose logical conceptions would seem to be in a state of disintegration have supposed the collection whose sole member is Gaius Julius Caesar to be identical with Gaius Julius Caesar himself -- a strange confusion considering that the latter was a man of immense force of intellect who was brought into the world by a grossly unskillful operation of surgery, while the other is nothing but an ens rationis brought into being by the idea of that man being chosen without any surgery at all and utterly deprived of any force of intellect or life."
Is this the same sense of 'Collection' as that being defined in the SUMO, i.e., in the definition of &%Collection? &%Collection seems to be something very pedestrian, I'm understanding it to mean something like "group of physical objects" or maybe "identifiable group of physical objects." (Are all groups of physical objects instances of &%Collection, e.g., is any subgroup of a given flock of sheep an instance of &%Collection?) A group of physical objects doesn't seem to be "brought into being by the idea" of its constituent member(s). Also, it doesn't seem that a &%Collection is an "abstraction"; a flock of sheep (example from the definition of &%Collection) isn't an abstraction is it?
What actually happens is this:
Peirce 6.382. We may say that a whole is an ens rationis whose being
consists in the copulate being of certain other things, either not entia
rationis or not so much so as the whole; so that a whole is analogous to
a collection, which is, in fact, a special kind of whole. There can be
no doubt that the word whole always brings before the mind the image of
a collection, and that we interpret the word whole by analogy with collection.
The idea of a collection is itself, however, by no means an easy one to
analyze. It is an ens rationis, abstraction, or fictitious subject (but
the adjective must be understood in a broad sense, to be considered below),
which is individual, and by means of which we are enabled to transform
universal propositions into singular propositions. Thus, the
proposition "all men are mortal," with a new subject and new predicate,
appears as "The collection of men is a collection of mortals"; just as,
for other purposes, and by means of other abstractions, we transform the
same proposition into "The character of mortality is possessed by every
man"; and the members of the collection are regarded as less fictitious
than the collection.
A "flock of sheep" is different from their individual members because
we attend only to a character possessed by these animal (their "sheepness"
that may be defined scientifically) in order to group them, and we
totally disregard the fact that they may be called by a nickname, that
some are playful, that some fall ill while others do not, that some are
bigger than others, etc.
But even with this earthy defintion of &%Collection, I share Pierre's concerns here. Given that a &%Collection can survive membership changes, it seems rather arbitrary to declare that a &%Collection can't survive a time period in which it has no members.
Consider an example given in the definition, a football team. If all the members of a football team die in a bus crash and the team is replenished the next day in an emergency draft, would we declare that the team had to start with a new 0-0 record and that the members couldn't pursue old club records? Or would we see this simply as a radical personnel change that the organization survived? If we maintain that &%Organization is a subclass of &%Collection, then it is not clear that no &%Collection can survive a loss of all of its members.Julius Caesar died long ago, but the collection whose sole member is Julius Caesar survived him.
JM
-- Jean-Marc Orliaguet ( jmo@medialab.chalmers.se ) - http://www.medialab.chalmers.se/people/jmo/ - Tel: +46 31 772 8581