SUO: Re: Query: Reification
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Previously In This Series ("Re: Buffy, The Hypostasis-Slayer"?):
Jon Awbrey wrote:
>
> Adam Pease wrote:
> >
> > Jon,
> > I have only what I'd call a "layman's" understanding of this term, but
> > in the context I've used it, I intend it to signify the creation of a term
> > to denote a statement of a relation. A better definition is provided at
> >
> > http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/Reification.html
> >
> > treatment of an analytic or abstract relationship as though it were a
> > concrete entity. (Young, p. l09)
> >
> > The process of regarding something abstract as a material entity,
> > Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," e.g., the mistake
> > of confusing a system, which is a construct, with the physical entity
> > described in its terms (see general systems theory). In social systems
> > reification is encouraged by the use of language and underlies many
> > processes of constructing social reality. (Krippendorff)
> >
> > At 12:22 AM 10/21/2000 -0400, Jon Awbrey wrote:
> > > ¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤
> > >
> > > Adam,
> > >
> > > In trying to follow the exchange between you and Matthew
> > > concerned with your joint and several notions of reducing
> > > n-ary (n-valent) relations to binary (bivalent) relations,
> > > I find myself tripped up a little by your many references
> > > to a problematic issue of "reification". It is likely
> > > that I may have missed an old discussion and I sort of
> > > know what the word means in a general way, but I was
> > > wondering if maybe you could give me some sense of
> > > what your specific use of it means in this context.
> > >
> > > Thanx in Prospect,
> > >
> > > Jon
> > >
> > > P.S. I hope you appreciate the fact that I resisted the
> > > joke about (Between Exchange Adam Matthew) as long
> > > as I did.
> > > J.A.
> > >
> > > ¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤
> >
> > -----------------
> > Adam Pease
> > Teknowledge
> > (650) 424-0500 x571
>
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>
> Adam,
>
> Okay, it looks like we are on (or near) the same (web) page
> with this, though we may still be looking at the issue from
> different angles, or in different lights. At any rate, this
> looks like a very good topic for discussion, and I think that
> John Sowa's world-model-theory triptych, that he painted for us
> at an earlier point in a strikingly similar discussion, may also
> have a bearing on these questions:
>
> <http://www.bestweb.net/~sowa/ontology/mthworld.gif>
>
> But I have to get to some household chores -- and there is
> the all-important diversion of the MSU-UoM game today --
> so it will probably be after the weekend before I get back
> to this.
>
> Cheers, Many Cheers,
>
> Jon
>
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Jon Awbrey also wrote:
>
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> Matthew,
>
> I am going to try and spend some time thinking about this issue,
> as it seem to be a source of some serious misunderstandings, but
> here are my initial, between-the-lines sorts of thoughts about it.
>
> West, Matthew MR SSI-GREA-UK wrote:
> >
> > Dear Jon,
> >
> > Thank you for bringing this up,
> > because it allows me to make
> > a particular point.
>
> > The whole point on spatio-temporal analysis is that all objects
> > are either spatio-temporal extents, classes, or relations.
>
> I actually have a way of writing such statements
> in my favorite version of propositional calculus.
> I'll explain this later on the "Praise ZOL" thread;
> for now just think of it as the "Pie-Chart" schema:
>
> MW : (Objects, (Spatio-Temporal Extents),(Classes),(Relations))
>
> > So all I am doing in identifying states
> > (which are spatio-temporal extents) is
> > identifying objects that have been hidden
> > by our intuitive/linguistic descriptions.
>
> Well, now you are using the word "state" in a way that
> I probably would not, because I am typically thinking
> about the state of a system. Now, I could think of
> a state as a spatial extent, namely, as a point or
> a subset of a state space, but that will usually
> require me to generalize the notion of a space
> far beyond the 3+1 dimensions of space-time.
>
> > You will recall in a previous e-mail I rejected reifying a relation
> > that did not involve identifying a hidden spatio-temporal extent.
> > The is actually a method in the maddness.
> >
> > On the other hand you seem to be fixed on only recognising
> > as objects things I would call whole objects, and you also
> > seem uncomfortable about classes that are not classes of
> > whole object.
>
> For me, the word "object" is an unsatisfactory translation,
> coming by way of Latin, for what the Greeks called "pragma".
> This little word is chock full of diverse connotations:
> aim, business, concern, end, endeavor, goal, intention,
> interest, purpose, sake, stake, target, undertaking,
> in addition to the meanings of object or objective.
> It is my sense of things that the usual sorts of
> compact, physical objects that we see around us
> are actually things that arise in a derivative
> way from these larger objectives, coming about
> through the process of forming orientations
> relative to some objective and then finding
> these organizations of our activities either
> obstructed or operationalized by dint of all
> of the impacts of these more obvious objects.
>
> Other than that, I use the word "object" in
> a sign-relational sense, to mean any object
> of a sign or sign process, for example, as
> when we speak of an "object of discussion"
> or an "object of thought".
>
> I am not sure if you use the word "class" the same way I do,
> informally, just an aggregate, collection, or set, formally,
> distinguished in some versions of set theory as sorta like
> a set but not of necessity having to be itself an element
> of any class. And I do not yet know what you mean by
> a "whole object" as opposed to the other kind.
>
> Many Regards,
>
> Jon Awbrey
>
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And Jon Awbrey had written:
>
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> Tom Gollier wrote:
> >
> > Jon,
> >
> > You write:
> >
> > > Try to think for a while like a simple-minded logician
> > > and not like a psychological phenomenologist.
>
> What I meant by that was something like this:
>
> Abstractions are just partial descriptions,
> descriptions that leave out a lot of detail.
>
> It is our bound fate as human narrators that
> all of our descriptions will be abstractions,
> as long as we talk about anything significant,
> extractions from the wealth of possible detail
> that are likely to be partial in both of these
> senses, incomplete and biased, and hence they
> will be samples, selections, simplifications,
> specimens, symptoms, ..., and thus to make
> a long story short, signs, just signs.
>
> So the question is not really whether there is something more
> to the subject after we have finished with our partial account --
> if the subject was interesting, there will always be more to say.
> The question is just whether certain sorts of partial description
> can be useful in understanding a vastly more complex reality.
> And classifying the patterns in "how we think" according to
> your favorite system of logical forms can indeed be useful,
> depending on your favorite system, of course.
>
> [ Digression:
> | This makes it sound like logic is a descriptive science,
> | just another branch of psychology, and, of course, we all
> | know that this particular idea is just not sound. Perhaps
> | it always begins as a descriptive description of language,
> | like noticing the tautology in "descriptive description",
> | but then it becomes a prescriptive doctrine that says,
> | in the same instance, "Quit saying stuff like that!",
> | or a normative science that says, more contingently,
> | "If you are interested in achieving a certain economy,
> | effectiveness, and efficiency in your communication,
> | then you will want to avoid the use of such redundant,
> | repetitive, and needless to say 'pleonastic' phrasing".
> | And you probably have heard about how Peirce championed
> | what he called a "non-psychological" account of logic,
> | with respect to which I have explained the funny way
> | that mathematically trained people then and now still
> | use the prefix "non" in such cases, almost an acronym
> | for "not of necessity", to widen a subject beyond its
> | initial domain by dropping one or more of the initial
> | axioms. What this means is that we can still regard
> | the descriptive study of "how we think" as providing
> | data, and some of the most fascinating data, indeed,
> | considering who we are and all, but still just grist
> | for the mill of a normative study. But I digress ...
> ]
>
> That seems simple enough, but you know there is more to be said.
> There are in the idioms of ordinary discussion about these matters
> just one or two or three things that are likely to cause confusion.
>
> I called your attention to this overcharged property of -ionized words,
> like "abstraction", that they equivocally denote both process and result,
> both conduct and product, if you will. So we have a picture like this:
>
> Abstraction
> Abstractee (the process) Abstraction
> (the object) •------->-------• (description)
>
> But as you well know, or have come to accept, it gets worse.
> Having invested so much in their partial descriptions, people
> will tend to become, well, 'partial' to them. And, human nature
> being what it is, it seems to be something of a sore annoyance to
> keep thinking about something that you love so much as imperfect,
> so people will come to imagine that there really is some object
> that is perfectly described by their favorite description.
> Comes the dawn of the hypostasis, the imaginary substance
> that we shove under our abstraction to shore it up.
>
> Abstraction
> Abstractee (the process) Abstraction
> (the object) •------->-------• (description)
> \ /
> \ /
> \ /
> \ /
> \ /
> \ /
> \ /
> •
> Abstraction
> (hypo-stasis)
>
> And with this form of triple equivocality in the word "abstraction"
> I think that the mathematician in all of us thinks to have achieved
> a "form of perfection" (FOP).
>
> And with that, I think that perhaps I should quit
> while I still have my head, and take up the rest
> of your note at a later time.
>
> I leave you to contemplate the charge of our champion.
>
> Jon
>
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Jon Awbrey now writes:
Adam, Matthew, & All,
Moving right along, I am going to have to try and take this up again
in a hit and miss, free associative, and dialogical fashion, since
I sense that there is something important here but cannot quite yet
get a handle on it.
On the one hand, I partially sympathize with your reservations about
what I think that you mean by "reification", or it's equally dubious
twin-folk "hypostasis", as I can still remember a time when that was
one of my own standard charges aginst many varieties of metaphysics,
by which "j'accuse" I think that I meant that they had a disposition
to think that all of their favorite terms and concepts automatically
denoted objects of unnecessary-to-examine substantial consistency,
and also that they had an inclination to deploy inappropriately
static forms of representation, thereby knocking all the life
out of our more vital and more vivid forms of action, conduct,
and living interactive process in and about a realistic world.
But that was a long time ago ...
Since then, I have run into this issue again and again,
quite intensely once (twice, thrice) when I went through
my personal "crisis of foundations" (COF) in regard to the
practice of mathematics, more recurrently in connection with
the matter of the "two abstractions" in Peirce's work, namely:
1. Precisive abstraction, or prescissive abstraction -- depending on
whether the Old Peirce or the Young Peirce is the one on your stamp.
This one is closest to the "ordinary kind" of abstraction, I think,
abstracting or extracting a selection of properties from a concrete
object, as if literally "drawing essences away from" its concrescences.
2. Hypostatic abstraction -- Ay, there's the rub! -- Many times, people
get distracted by the "abstraction" part, when they really ought to be
trying to examine the "hypostatic" part. Here, the "drawing away" has
already been accomplished in the usual way -- nor all your piety or wit
can lure it back to restir half a life -- and the funny business comes in
just where you start to imagine that there just really might be, must be
some thing, the "hypostasis", "hypostatic object", or "underlying reity",
that is precisely, not just approximately, fit by the features prescinded.
As it happens, these issues, Peirce's and Dewey's possibly differing
views on them, and so on, have been the object of many discussions,
at times desultory, at times intense, on the Peirce List. Having
just recently formulated what I humbly fancy to be the distilled
essence of my entire wit on the subject, I have included it above.
Now all of this might be just so much tempest in a metaphysical teapot,
if it were not for the circumstance that this putative distinction between
prescision and hypostasis -- (Between Distinction Hypostasis Prescision)? --
bears quite heavily on another distinction of Peirce's, that between what
he called "corollarial" and "theorematic" reasoning in mathematics, or
in the formal sciences, generally.
Thereby hangs a tale, of course,
but it needs must bide its time.
So, let me know where you are with this ...
Cheers,
Jon Awbrey
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