ONT Re: Hypostatic And Prescisive Abstraction -- Discussion Notes
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HAPA. Discussion Note 4
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By way of starting to compile a "key to abstractions and relatives"
in the spirit of an old-fashioned field study key, I have gone back
through our neck of the woulds and gathered these initial specimens:
1. HIROTUFIA. Handy Indexical Rules Of Thumb Used For Identifying Abstractions
1.1. 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.
1.2. CSP on HA: "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."
2. HIROTUFIR. Handy Indexical Rules Of Thumb Used For Identifying Relatives
2.1. 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.
2.2. Let me just throw out this thought: Words and phrases like
"ego", "number", "quark", "unicorn", "Starship Enterprise",
along with all of the rest of the words and phrases that
we use, have no meaning at all outside of some community,
context, or framework of interpretation, so all of their
meanings and all of their specifications on any semantic
or semiotic feature, like "abstract" or "concrete", are
relative to the given community, context, or framework
of interpretation that gives them those meanings and
those specifications.
Jon Awbrey
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