SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema
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LIS. Discussion Note 87
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Matthew, Mike, et al.
I think that I can now explain some of my
previous remarks on abstraction slightly
better than I did before.
I will continue to recommend the following selections from Peirce,
plus a standard sort of dictionary definition from Runes, having
to do with the related topics of abstract objects, hypostasis,
hypostatic abstraction, personification, and reification.
We could save ourselves about a hundred years or work
through the careful study of the collective insights
into the problem of abstraction that are contained
in these excerpts:
01. http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10964.html -- Cain and Abel
02. http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10965.html -- Dormative Virtue
03. http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10966.html -- Honey is Sweet
04. http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10991.html -- Math Abstraction
05. http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg11022.html -- Reading Runes
06. http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg11025.html -- Hypostatization
07. http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg11028.html -- Abstract Objects
08. http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg11079.html -- Subjectal Abstraction
D1. http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg10967.html -- Metaphormazes
From my way of looking at it, an abundance of evidence developed in our
discussions that tends to indicate that abstractness is not an absolute
property at all but a relative or relational property. Some of these
clues are as follows:
1. Abstraction is a process. The very word means to "draw away from".
An abstraction is thus abstracted "from" something else, which is
then considered to be more concrete in comparison. Not only that,
but the operation of abstraction can be repeated, it seems almost
indefinitely, giving successive orders of increasing abstraction.
Taken together, these features of operation and order, of passing
from one state to a higher state on a given dimension of quality,
are the hallmarks of 2-adic order relations.
2. Abstract terms are interpretive. They are terms that are found in
the context of a story or a theory, and the meaning that they have
in each instance depends on the story or theory in which they are
being considered. That is one of the reasons why we keep running
into the curious kinship of theoretical terms to fictional names.
This charcteristic of abstract terms is closely related to this
next diagnostic test for recognizing their presenting symptoms:
3. 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.
Jon Awbrey
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