SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema
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LIS. Discussion Note 80
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JA = Jon Awbrey
MP = Mike Pool
Mike,
Editing a bit for typos and hopefully clarity, and continuing.
MP: For example, it's very hard to crisply divide the world
into Chair versus Non-Chair or Person versus Non-Person
unless we stipulate to a, possibly arbitrary, precise
definition or criterion. Nevertheless, the concepts
"chair" and "person" are perfectly good sortals and
should take their respective rightful places in
associated ontologies. In other words, even
if you're right about "Abstract", how is
this relevant to its legitimacy in
someone's taxonomy?
JA: The words "Chair" and "Person" are simply incapable of embodying enough
of that selective power that we call "information" in their respective
anatomical ligaments of 5 and 6 bytes length to transport all of the
meanings that they will be found to convey to the suitably prepared
interpreter thereof. So if the loin's share of that informational
empowerment is embodied anywhere between the spaces of texts, it
must be elsewhere than in the clout of these stringey thingies.
With regard to localizing this power of meaning toward an end,
we may attribute some of it to the agencies of interpreters
and some of it to the constraints of context, for example,
the sort of context that'd make light work of the riddle:
"When is a Chair a Person?" But this is all guesswork.
MP: Is this a roundabout way of claiming that words have meanings
in virtue of the fact that people associate meanings with them?
True enough.
Yes, it was an illustration of why Peirce says that all words
and all concepts, properly speaking and properly conceiving,
are species of signs that fall under the axiom of "symbols",
whose meanings, both denotative and connotative, rely on
there being interpretant signs to register their timbre.
MP: More to the point, I don't understand why possible
or even widespread disagreement over which things
count as an X leads to the conclusion that X is
a "relative property of things" or is not an
"Essence". Is "person", for example,
a relative property of things?
JA: I read it merely as one of the diagnostic symptoms of
trying to use too few dimensions in our mental models.
It is in the same vein that I gave this rule-of-thumb:
JA: A practical test of whether a property of a thing
is a relative property of a thing is that one needs
additional information, beyond that which identifies
the thing, in order to make a decision about whether
the thing in question has the property in question.
MP: Okay, let us assume that I'm capable of identifying
a thing, Y. For any property X, it seems to be the
case that I'll need additional information before I'm
able to determine whether Y has the property X. I'll
need to know what the definition of X is. Then, upon
learning the definition of X, I also have to further
determine/learn whether Y meets the criterion for
being an X. So does this mean that every property
is a relative property of a thing?
All this abstract thought makes me sleepy -- it must
be some kind of industrial strength dormitive virtue.
Let's look at a concrete example. In the old tongue,
lexemes like "brother", "father", "mother", "sister",
were arcanely enough classified as "relative terms".
To say that someone was a father, in the lay not the
clerical sense of that word, of course, was not to
speak of his essence, but to implicate an accident
of history, not to say that it made his child an
accident, but merely to say that being a father
contains as a part of its idea a reference to
a child somewhere. Sic semper relative terms,
mutatis mutandis. Consequently, if we are
inquiring into whether Mr. X is a father,
in the lay sense of the term, the first
thing that will probably come to mind
is to ask whether Mr. X has child.
And that information would be
definitive of being a father,
as a role, not an essence.
Put your Leibniz away now,
let's not go there, yet.
Lotze interrupts today ...
Jon Awbrey
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