SUO: Re: Aggregation, Collection, Community, Granfalloon, Karass, Set, System, Team, ...

[Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>]

Doug McDavid wrote:
>
> This thread is one of several
> where I could make this point,
> but I like the example of the team.
> 
> It seems to me from an ontological perspective
> it is very interesting to talk about the nature
> of teams, the various kinds of teams that we know
> of (professional, university, informal children's
> teams chosen on a playground, etc.), how the various
> kinds of teams differ from one another, and how they
> each differ from other forms of human social systems.
> Additionally, how human social systems differ from
> other natural social systems (ant colonies, schools
> of fish, cooperating beavers, etc.), and how living
> social systems differ and are similar to other living
> systems, such as organisms (humans, whales, worms),
> systemic parts of organisms (cardiovascular systems,
> digestive systems etc.), cells, robots, cars,
> telecommunication networks, the whirlpool in
> my bathtub and the Great Red Spot of Jupiter.
> In other words ontological consideration of
> systems, whether autopoietic or not, complex
> and adaptive or not, dissipative structures
> or not, legally constituted or not, and any
> of many interesting dimensions of this subject.
> 
> Is it too soon to start carving up the work of the SUO
> along these lines?  Or is this ever going to be the focus
> of this work?  At some level it is probably important to have
> exhaustive discussions of how set theory and 4-d vs. 3-d+time
> would accommodate meaningful classifications.  It certainly must
> be interesting, since we keep gravitating back to these discussions.
> 
> I could have easily jumped into the long discussion of relationships vs. relations.
> What I would have said there is that there is that while the various technical meanings
> of these terms is interesting, it should be equally interesting, from an ontological point
> of view, that there are large numbers of interesting types of relationships (contractual,
> proximity, emotional, linguistic, assembly, etc., etc.)  Isn't this what we're about
> in this work?   Or is it still just too early to start?
> 
> Doug McDavid
> Certified Executive Consultant
> Business Innovation Services - IBM, US
> Member of IBM Academy of Technology
> mcdavid@us.ibm.com  --  916-549-4600

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Doug,

> Or is it still just too early to start?

Perhaps, but I think it is probably too late to quit.

I will just free-associate a bit -- as opposed to my customary practice! --
as you bring up a whole tangle of subjects that I have frequently and
recurrently thought about, and yet, with which and regard to which,
respectively, I have not really gotten all that far, nor of their
outcome nor of their upshot been able to foresee even so well as
to the end of this sentence.

Community.  This is a holy word in pragmatic thought,
as the very definition of reality depends on it, but
a pragmatic thinker, if he or she has been remitting
a requisite quantum of attention to the proper cache
of holy writ, does not get him- or her-self mixed up
in the dueling dualisms of any ostensible opposition
between the so-called "individual agent" or singular
person -- which they consider to be an absurd notion
on the face of it, and from the very inertial get-go,
if you catch my drift -- and the admittedly somewhat
idealized and potentially remote, no matter how real
in its infinitesimally e-mediate effect, idea of the
"ultimate community" (UC), though all keen observers
cannot help but to note the quantity of tension that
subsists between actual persons and actual societies.

Here is my favorite bit of "Chapter & Peirce" on the subject in question:

| Two things here are all-important to assure oneself of and to remember.
| The first is that a person is not absolutely an individual.  His
| thoughts are what he is "saying to himself", that is, is saying
| to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of
| time.  When one reasons, it is that critical self that one is
| trying to persuade;  and all thought whatsoever is a sign,
| and is mostly of the nature of language.  The second thing
| to remember is that the man's circle of society (however
| widely or narrowly this phrase may be understood),
| is a sort of loosely compacted person, in some
| respects of higher rank than the person of
| an individual organism.  It is these two
| things alone that render it possible for
| you -- but only in the abstract, and in
| a Pickwickian sense -- to distinguish
| between absolute truth and
| what you do not doubt.
| (CP 5.421).
|
| Charles Sanders Peirce, "What Pragmatism Is",
| 'The Monist', Volume 15, 1905, pages 161-181,
| Also in the 'Collected Papers', CP 5.411-437.

I had a lot more to say here, but I think that I had better
go-get some coffee, before my mind starts to wander too far.

More, Later,

Jon Awbrey

Incidental Musements:

http://alumni.aitec.edu.au/~bwechner/Documents/Bokonon/dictionary.html
http://alumni.aitec.edu.au/~bwechner/Documents/Bokonon/poems.html
http://acad.fandm.edu/~al_burgman/vonnegut/BOKONON.HTML
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/catscradle/analysis.html
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/catscradle/section1.html
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/catscradle/summary.html
http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~stripp/1785/catscradle.html
http://www.castlechaos.com/library/catscradle.html
http://www.whipworm.com/bokonon/dictionary.htm
http://data007.tripod.com/terms.html

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