SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema
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LIS. Discussion Note 42
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Matthew,
Tracking back to this juncture:
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: 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.
JA: 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.
The fact that you could classify these terms
so quickly is something that gives me pause.
Such a level of certainty could only reflect
your reflexive theory above where they stand.
These would usually be called something like
"theoretical concepts or terms", presumed to
refer, if they do refer, which depends on the
utility or the validity of a specified theory,
to things that are usually called "hypothetical
or theoretical constructs, entities, or objects".
For example, there are on average about as many
theories of the ego in psychology as there are
psychologists, where the number of theorists
who do not admit the term to their theories
is balanced out by the number of theorists
who, like Freud, disported more than one.
The same goes for each of the other terms, whether you treat
theory as a brand of folklore, or folklore as a brand of theory.
The moral of the story is that we cannot enter the realm of theory,
or keep from getting lost in its enchantments, without becoming self-
consciously reflective about the status of signs (concepts and words)
as signlike things that may or may not refer to any objective objects
at all, the fate or fortune of which issue is every bit as sensitive
to the particular theory in which the lexical legumenon is embedded
as was the proverbial princess of another story.
That is why the direct approach to describing a complex reality is
fatally doomed. It is just plain uneconomical to develop a whole
theory of arithmetic for counting apples, another whole theory
of arithmetic for counting bananas, another whole theory of
arithmetic for counting cherries, ..., ad infinitum.
The alternative is to develop a theory of numbers
as abstract objects, the models of an abstract
theory of numbers. Then, as an analytically
separate question, one asks whether this
theory and its models have any relation
to the phenomena or the sensory data
that appear in a given application,
revealing anything of use about
the reality that produces them.
Jon Awbrey
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