SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema
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LIS. Discussion Note 43
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JA = Jon Awbrey
MW = Matthew West
MW: Please treat my thoughts as an initial interpretation/categorisation
to open the discussion about what you meant when you use these terms.
You may have noticed I favour a direct approach.
Matthew,
Well, I can see that you are too pre-occupied with active issues
to address this topic, well, directly, right at the moment, and
so I will just throw out this thought: That words and phrases
like "ego", "number", "quark", "unicorn", "Starship Enterprise",
along with all of the rest of the words and phrases that we use,
have no meaning at all outside of some community, context, or
framework of interpretation, and so all of their meanings and
all of their statuses on any semantic or semiotic feature,
like "abstract" or "concrete", is relative to the given
community, context, or frame of interpretation that
gives them those statuses and those meanings.
In particular, the status of any term on any differential
dimension like abstract/concrete or possible/inconsistent
is "interpretive" not "absolute".
It is simply not possible to integrate a genuine diversity
of communities, contexts, or frames of interpretation into
a larger whole, whether an IFF or a LOT or whatever turns
out to fit them the best, without constant reflection on
these first contingencies of the possibility of meaning.
Jon Awbrey
JA: 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.
JA: 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".
JA: 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.
JA: 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.
JA: 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.
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