Re: SUO: RE: Axiom and Intentionality vs Extentionality
At 12:14 PM 04/11/01 +0100, Jean-Marc Orliaguet wrote:
Mike Pool wrote:
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?
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:
I know little about Peirce and found this a helpful clarification of what
he's trying to say. However, my original question was an attempt to
determine whether you and Peirce are denoting something different with
'collection' than that which the SUMO creator(s) is trying to denote with
'&%Collection'.
Just to be clear, is it your position that Peirce is defining the same
thing as that being defined in the SUMO, i.e., things that "have a
position in space-time", or do Peirce and the SUMO just happen to be
using the same words?
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.
But if you're using the term 'collection' in the same way that the SUMO
is using it then this collection has a spatial location after Caesar
died. I'm puzzled by this claim.
JM
--
Jean-Marc Orliaguet ( jmo@medialab.chalmers.se )
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http://www.medialab.chalmers.se/people/jmo/
- Tel: +46 31 772 8581
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Mike Pool
Information Extraction & Transport, Inc.
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