SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema
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LIS. Discussion Note 68
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JA = Jon Awbrey
MW = Matthew West
Matthew,
Returning to this point and continuing --
JA: So where have we got? As usual exactly nowhere.
| What is the operational test of the distinction
| between abstract things and non-abstract things?
JA: Until I get some reason to believe otherwise, I must
now conclude that the supposed distinction is almost
purely a matter of personal or regional taste, about
which no further dispute can serve any actual purpose.
MW: Of course! There are a large number of possible distinctions
and a small number of familiar labels, but LIS was our pick at
a mapping between them.
MW: By the way, you really should see the labels in the model
as no more than that. We are not trying to define words
or terms. They are just arbitrary labels where we have
sometimes used words to be (hopefully) more helpful
than say E003, which would serve as well.
JA: I think that you have misunderstood what I am saying here.
I am saying something more than that the labels ostencilled
on the different sides of the ostensible distinction may be
arbitrary or matters of taste. I am saying that the line of
the particular distinction that you and and a number of others
have proposed to draw in the intended space of things is itself
arbitrary, capricious, factitious, imaginary, specious, spurious,
and largely determined by personal intuitions and regional biases
that remain as yet largely unexpressed and consequently unexamined
for their cogency and even for their prospective coherence, almost
as if a crew of painters were to try and paint a mobius strip in
two colors without first surveying the topology of the space in
which they proposed to accomplish this work.
MW: Of course. But I can say the same of
the distinctions you have in mind.
Good. Then we both understand the problem.
The thing to do with that initial understanding is to accept the
phenomenon of disagreement about basic concepts as a thing that
is due and worth some attention in its own right, and to face
the problems that are occasioned by it as squarely as we can.
Jon Awbrey
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