SUO: Re: Kifilization And Its Discontents
Matthew,
I am going to try and weed out the older stuff
and just focus on the new points that you raise.
> > > MW: Class, a set to which we attach some significance.
> >
> > Okay, good. I believe that this admirable notion of
> > "a collection to which we attach some significance",
>
> MW: I agree with the unstated correction.
Well, it was unstated for a reason.
Let's just call it a very tentative
suggestion, as I really do not know
how it will all turn out in the end.
> > under any other name, is one that we definitely need
> > to keep in mind, and to which we ought to pay rather
> > a bit more of additional and concentrated attention.
> >
> > But, just by way of allowing us to keep on talking
> > to logicians and to mathematicians -- you know how
> > they are! -- and by way of avoiding the inevitable
> > confusion that is bound to follow from using these
> > terms at odds with the way that they already do --
> > we must be flexible since they obviously cannot --
> > let me just suggest that we look around for another
> > way to describe our sense of the significant object.
> >
> > I am not yet sure if this would work -- we will just
> > have to see -- but it may be feasible to forge a not
> > too confounding and too entangling link with the not
> > unrelated topic of "natural kinds" if we contemplate
> > using the word "kind" to describe the brand of class,
> > the type of set, or the cast of a class in such role
> > as you appear to have in mind here. Let us try fora
> > bit and see, may we, just as a kind of an experiment?
> >
> > If that brand of compromise does not work out, then
> > we may have to seek out an altogether new neologism --
> > if you will excuse my tautologism, and I think that
> > you know how much I would hate to have to do that!? --
> > for example, in the latest cast of my 'dissipation'
> > I have been using the phrase "indexed set" to speak
> > of a reasonable facsimile of this very notion, that
> > is to say, one that portrays a verisimilar ilk tuit.
>
> MW: It won't (work out). Sooner or later
> we will find someone who uses "kind" in some
> other special way.
Yes, I was and still am having a lot of trouble thinking up
a good strategy for diverse and shared usage in this case,
and I am already unhappy with this particular suggestion.
So let me just leave it as yet another associative link to
chase in the "Grand Synchronoplastic Infundibular Reticulum" --
the bag, or the net, or the web of our "words and ideas" (WAI's).
But there remains a residuum of not a little utility to this particular idea:
1. There is the specific connection with the topic of "natural kinds",
which is almost always used with this qualifying adjective in order
to keep oriented by the tropic of the topic, its general direction,
if not always to be clear about the subject itself, or what it is.
2. Whenever somebody proposes to use a maximally generic term
or an inherently vague word, like "kind" or "sort", in some
very specific technical sense, we can rely on the fact that
customary practice, if not the very idea of the word itself,
will almost always raise its hackles to resist its indenture
to any such manner of semantic and semiotic servitude. Now,
it is true that we have somehow managed to beat and to cudgel
the term "type" into such a sortid and such an unkind type of
submission, but only at the price that everyone now recognizes
what a "jack-of-all-trades" this peculiar word is, or has become.
3. I will speak again, another time, of the link that I thought I saw
to my idea of the "indexed set", probably not exactly what it sounds
like, as I know that I had trouble with this bit of terminology, too.
> My usual approach is to use a qualifier to distinguish
> different meanings. So here we might use "logical class"
> and "general class" (or some such).
That would accord with my practice,
generically speaking, anyway.
Many Regards,
Jon Awbrey
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