ONT Re: Hypostatic And Prescisive Abstraction
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HAPA. Discussion Note 1
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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.
Jon Awbrey
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