SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema
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LIS. Discussion Note 39
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JA = Jon Awbrey
MW = Matthew West
JA: I would like to spend some time focusing on this initial distinction
among <things> as being <possible_individuals> or <abstract_objects>,
where you refer to the differential feature of existing in spacetime
or not, respectively.
MW: | thing
|
| A <thing> is anything that is or may be thought about or perceived,
| including material and non-material objects, ideas, and actions.
|
| Every <thing> is either
| a <possible_individual>,
| or an <abstract_object>.
|
| NOTE 1. Every <thing> is identifiable within a system.
| System identifiers created by other systems and received
| as part of a data exchange may be stored for future reference
| as an identification, referring to the originating organisation
| or system.
|
| NOTE 2. Every example provided for other entity data types
| declared in this schema is also an example of <thing>.
|
| http://www.tc184-sc4.org/wg3ndocs/wg3n1328/lifecycle_integration_schema/lexical/thing.html
MW: | A <possible_individual> is a <thing> that exists in space and time.
|
| http://www.tc184-sc4.org/wg3ndocs/wg3n1328/lifecycle_integration_schema/lexical/possible_individual.html
MW: | An <abstract_object> is a <thing> that does not exist in space-time.
|
| http://www.tc184-sc4.org/wg3ndocs/wg3n1328/lifecycle_integration_schema/lexical/abstract_object.html
JA: Many ontologies begin with a distinction that is at least
superficially similar to this one, and many of them also
mention the same specific difference, that of existing
in space-and/or-time versus the apparent alternative.
In many respects, then, my questions are meant for
all ontologies that build on this notion, and not
yours alone.
JA: In this connection, I would like to call your attention to some of the
things that C.S. Peirce said about abstractions -- and if anybody ever
knew abstraction, this was the guy -- in this case using the old term
of art "hypostatic abstraction" to mean what we would normally call
an "abstract object", for example, egos, numbers, quarks, unicorns.
MW: I am out of the office at the moment and accessing
e-mail on my mobile, so looking things up on the
internet doesn't work too well.
MW: However, to address your list above:
MW: 1. An ego would be a part of a person,
and so exist in space-time and so
be an individual.
MW: 2. Numbers are abstract, arguably sets of sets.
MW: 3. Quarks also exist in space-time, though tying
them down may be tricky, so are individuals.
MW: 4. Unicorns can be considered to exist in some possible world,
and have a spatio-temporal extent in that possible world.
Yikes. I see that there is a radical culture clash here.
The things that I mentioned were supposed to be totally
unproblematic instances of things that are standardly
used in all sorts of literatures as classic examples
of abstract objects, constructs, hypostatic entities,
reifications, in the old sense of the word, whatever
you want to call them. We will have to see if there
is some way to establish cross-cultural communication
with respect to these recalcitrantly commonplace topics.
I will have to think for a while about how to do this.
Maybe it would be best to move on to Peirce's example.
What about "sweetness"? What kind of <thing> is that?
For the sake of mobility, I will copy Peirce's text
and my illustrations of the HA transformation here:
| Look through the modern logical treatises, and you will find that they
| almost all fall into one or other of two errors, as I hold them to be;
| that of setting aside the doctrine of abstraction (in the sense in
| which an abstract noun marks an abstraction) as a grammatical topic
| with which the logician need not particularly concern himself; and
| that of confounding abstraction, in this sense, with that operation
| of the mind by which we pay attention to one feature of a percept to
| the disregard of others. The two things are entirely disconnected.
|
| The most ordinary fact of perception, such as "it is light", involves
| 'precisive' abstraction, or 'prescission'. But 'hypostatic' abstraction,
| the abstraction which transforms "it is light" into "there is light here",
| which is the sense which I shall commonly attach to the word abstraction
| (since 'prescission' will do for precisive abstraction) is a very special
| mode of thought. It consists in taking a feature of a percept or percepts
| (after it has already been prescinded from the other elements of the percept),
| so as to take propositional form in a judgment (indeed, it may operate upon
| any judgment whatsoever), and in conceiving this fact to consist in the
| relation between the subject of that judgment and another subject, which
| has a mode of being that merely consists in the truth of propositions of
| which the corresponding concrete term is the predicate.
|
| Thus, we transform the proposition, "honey is sweet",
| into "honey possesses sweetness". "Sweetness" might be
| called a fictitious thing, in one sense. But since the
| mode of being attributed to it 'consists' in no more than
| the fact that some things are sweet, and it is not pretended,
| or imagined, that it has any other mode of being, there is,
| after all, no fiction. The only profession made is that we
| consider the fact of honey being sweet under the form of a
| relation; and so we really can. I have selected sweetness
| as an instance of one of the least useful of abstractions.
| Yet even this is convenient. It facilitates such thoughts
| as that the sweetness of honey is particularly cloying;
| that the sweetness of honey is something like the
| sweetness of a honeymoon; etc.
|
| C.S. Peirce, CP 4.235, "The Simplest Mathematics",
| Chapter 3 of the "Minute Logic", Jan-Feb 1902.
|
| http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg05091.html
| Referring to a few of Peirce's standard discussions
| of "hypostatic abstraction" (HA), the main thing
| about HA is that it turns an adjective or some
| part of a predicate into an extra subject,
| upping the arity of the main predicate
| in the process.
|
| For example, a typical case of HA occurs in the transformation
| from "honey is sweet" to "honey possesses sweetness", which we
| could choose to represent in several different ways as follows:
|
| Sweet(honey) ~~~> Possesses(honey, sweetness)
|
| S(h) ~~~> P(h, s)
|
| S P
| o o
| | ~~~> |
| o o
| h <h,s>
|
| ^
| [S] ~~~> /P\
| | o->-o
| | | |
| o o o
| h h s
|
| The chief thing about this form of grammatical transformation is that we
| abstract the adjective "sweet" from the main predicate, thus arriving at
| a new, increased-arity predicate "possesses", and as a by-product of the
| reaction, as it were, precipitating out the substantive "sweetness" as a
| new subject of the new predicate.
|
| http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg05092.html
HAPA. Hypostatic And Prescisive Abstraction
01. http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10964.html -- Cain and Abel
02. http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10965.html -- Dormative Virtue
03. http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10966.html -- Honey is Sweet
04. http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10991.html -- Math Abstraction
D1. http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10967.html -- Metaphormasis
Jon Awbrey
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