SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema
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LIS. Discussion Note 86
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[Reposting after 1 hour]
JA = Jon Awbrey
MW = Matthew West
Matthew,
It looks like we may just be able
to cap off this old well for now.
JA: My question is: How can we be assured that you are
collating dimensions, and not just conflating them?
MW: Well if the property is in the axiom, then it may just be
that it is the piece of work that is left, since we only
have taxonomic and structural axioms at present.
MW: To put it another way, what is a property?
JA: I will adduce a few standard bits of wisdom to the account later on,
but in the theory of intensions, qualities, properties, or whatever,
that I am currently trying, somewhat off the cuff, to explain here,
a property, like sweetness, is commonly recognized by many speakers
and thinkers as an abstract object of discussion and thought, and
I am just trying to figure out if the LIS_underscored concept of
an abstract_object has any clear relation to this classical idea
of an abstract object.
MW: And how is this different from a concept?
JA: A concept is a sign.
A property is an object.
MW: So the concept is what we actually store to
represent the property "out there", right?
JA: That's the way I think of it. The way I understand it, it's what's
implied by calling something an "object", whether abstract, concrete,
physical, or possible, though I will have to think more on the possible.
The idea of "objectivity", or that something is "objective", means that it
has a certain quality of "out-there-ness", which means that others out there
can recognize the same object or objective as having a reality in the outer
world, that is to say, outside the world of our personal interior theatre.
JA: Some people will take this quality of out-there-ness quite literally,
others will take it as a convenient or conventional figure of speech --
either way, it doesn't really change the way they actually speak all
that much, standardly treating property names as grammatical subjects
and, as all of my grammar school teachers taught, grammatical objects.
We may ask: Is that particular style of speech useful or valuable?
That is what I call a "pragmatic question".
MW: OK, that's fine then. I was only counting the
things we actually stored in the computer.
As you know, to speak of signs being "stored in" the computer is
to flourish a garden variety bit of picturesque speech, commonly
known as the "box" (or the "tin"?) metaphor, and it forms one of
those potentially deleterious manners of speaking and habits of
thinking that computer science instructors must be diligent to
unroot from the minds of their beginning students, although,
of course, having been subjected to that propadeutic bit
of weeding, the no-longer-novice student may safely go
back to speaking loosely as before, just so long as
he or she does not lapse into thinking loosely.
Synchronistically enough, I was just now
engaged in another discussion about this.
Here are some modified excerpts from my
half of the conversation:
The term "mental sign" is not my favorite either, but I include it
simply because it's included in all of the classical lists, and it
seems to speak to some people. If I were forced to make sense of
it, just in my own personal terms, I would say that it's one of
those "fabulous or theoretical terms" that is used in many
theories of how the mind functions and how thought works.
So "mental" just means "psychological", which an old def
that I learned in my psych program and that sticks in my
mind soully because of it's acronym "CAMS", includes the
facets of cognitive, affective, motor, semantic factors.
And "sign" is easy for fans of Peirce, since a sign is
anything whatever that fits the role of a sign in any
one of his explicit definitions of a sign relation.
>From the angle of systems theory, though, I will not be
happy until I can speak of the whole state of the whole
system in question being a sign "of" its object system
"to" another whole state of that same whole system.
I mean speaking sensibly and in detail, that is.
Jon Awbrey
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