SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema
o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
LIS. Discussion Note 46
o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
JA = Jon Awbrey
MW = Matthew West
MW: OK let's go through these one at a time. It is
already clear that we have different meanings
for abstract. Of course the data model has
my meaning in it not yours.
Matthew,
It may help to explain why I am interested in these particular issues
and the point of view that I take on them. I am mostly interested in
the sort of architecture that it would take to facilitate examination
of these questions, to bring into some kind of meaningful interaction
the different perspectives that have recurrently been taken up in the
past with regard to them, and to do all this on something approaching
the proverbial "level playing field", so that their vantages, whether
ad- or disad-, might be compared to some useful purpose.
Of course, no one is so naive, anymore, as to believe in the stories
of an absolutely level playing field -- that would be about as naive
as believing in the "ontologically neutral language" of ancient tale.
Still, given a set of viewpoints on a specified subject, it is often
possible to mark off a playing field on which they might play nicely.
So I am less interested here -- a lack of interest that I'm sure many
others share -- in presenting my particular theories of egos, numbers,
quarks, sweetness, lite or otherwise, the Starship Enterprise of any
model number, unicorns, or even the celebrated 'virtus dormitiva'.
I mentioned that selection of ostentatious terms, that ostensibly
refer to the corresponding selection of ostensible entities, only
as examples of what we may call "parabolic or theoretical terms",
because they play their parts from the very inception of their
ostensible conceptions principally in parables and theories.
What I do think might constitute a more common compulsion,
if scarcely yet a more perfect co-product, is to study the
architecture of an e-forum, e-gora, or e-lab of some order
that would allow us to begin conversing in a more sensible
fashion about such terms and such entities, extant or not.
So I will try to keep my eyes on that prize.
JA: One of the features that points to an abstract object or
a hypostatic abstraction is its being known by description,
in other words, by the predicates that are attributed to it
in remote reports of some variety, or in the various stories
and theories that are spun about it, instead of being known
more concretely and directly by acquaintance. That is one
of the marks of all of the things that I mentioned before:
dormitive virtues, egos, numbers, quarks, sweetness, the
Starship Enterprise, and last not not least, unicorns.
MW: Egos. I guessed this one. Please describe what
you mean by an ego. (I presume we are talking
about an ego, and not the set of egos).
Here are some facts about egos that come to mind right off,
that I think are instructive for the bigger questions about
abstract objects, hypostatic abstractions, and parabolic or
theoretical entitities.
"Cogito ergo sum" --
There's an "ergo" in that, but no "ego",
not even the proverbial cartesian brand,
while the translated "I think thus I am"
has two appearances of the first person
singular pronoun "I".
Why is that? Well, Latin most commonly assimilates the agent
into the predicate, expressing it far less ostentatiouly than
English as a mere inflection of the verb, and it only becomes
necessary to use the word "ego" when you need to make express
mention of the self, for example, as the object of accusative
verb forms.
This is a pithy epitome of what Peirce calls "hypostatization",
a word that I have trouble both speaking and writing, so allow
me to call it the "hypostatic abstraction" (HA) transformation.
MW: Numbers. Well I agree numbers are abstract.
If you look in the data model you will find
them there explicitly.
MW: I take quarks to be spatio-temporal objects,
and thus individuals. I accept they are not
within our normal experience, but that is not
enough to make them abstract in my sense.
The reason that I mentioned quarks, aside, off course, from the
joysprachlich pungency of the word, thrice-burrowed from common
slanguage to gel manly curds outa guild sols of the 8-fold whey,
is that it's one of those parabolic terms that I can recall, in
my own lifecycle, cycling through many distinct anglish degrees
of curdulity with respect to its general credibility in science.
MW: Sweetness is a property that some individuals have.
Within our model that would make it a class which
is abstract. The things that were sweet would be
members of that class.
I think that maybe it will be best to stick with this
shortest and sweetest of examples for a while, as it
appears to present the least number of distractions.
I think that the critical thing for our purposes is to try and see how
the process of abstraction actually works in action, and here the best
description that I've seen is given by Peirce. So I recommend it for
continuing consideration:
| 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
I think that I can point out at this juncture that the HA process,
as Peirce describes it, and as I try to picture it here, is akin
to the process of lambda abstraction that provides us with one
very successful model of computation, underpinning the tongue
of Lisp, just for one example.
MW: The starship enterprise does exist in space-time, but not
necessarily ours. I can see that this is abstract in the
sense that it may never be real in our world, and certainly
isn't a present or historical object, but it does not fit our
definition of abstract.
MW: Unicorns are fictional animals that do not exist in our world
but could exist in some other possible world, and would exist
in space-time therefore they are individuals and not abstract.
The first thing that we have to decide here is what real use we want
to make of these examples. If they're just intended as entertaining
examples of fictitious entities, that's one thing. Any other example
of a parabolic or theoretical term will do. If we have an application
in mind where we would need to talk intelligently about the meaning of
literary and mythical symbols, which is what many serious people would
see as giving these examples a modicum of real interest, that's another
thing. I once took courses in Literature and Film where we spent whole
years on the study of themes like Archetype, Myth, Science Fiction, and
Surrealism. There are lots of people out there who are interested in
using logical representations and ontologies for just such things --
many recent conversations with folks like Murray Altheim continue
to remind me of this -- but spinning the gold of Arts and Letters
into the hay of literal FOL travesties is not an intelligent way
to address these interests and applications.
The maxim is: Logic should not make us stupid.
Ergo, if it's making us stupid, it ain't logic.
MW: My mapping so far between your abstract and our model is that
your abstract is our abstract plus all possible_individuals
that are not actual (in our world). I am uncertain about
quarks and egos. You may be uncertain about my analysis.
JA: But when you think about it, you will probably realize
that this is yet another one of those distinctions that
is more a matter of degree than an absolute dissection,
since all data of perception is to some degree remote.
JA: This has certain implications.
o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o