SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema
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LIS. Discussion Note 105
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Matthew,
I have on the off moments continued to think about this problem of
the character of abstract objects, braced or infixedly underscored
or otherwise, and here is what I've been thinking as a way to move
forward. Let's drop that list of terms whose abstract objectivity
of reference is so controversial and take up another abstract term
that has lately been in the news, the "Price Of Tea In China", and,
as you may anticipate I am compelled henceforth to call it "POTIC".
In trying to learn from our previous experiences with these issues,
I will make a point of focusing on the abstract term "POTIC" first,
that is, the string of characters in search of an object to denote,
making it a separate question what sort of object, if any, they do,
and setting the imbroglios about what sort of matter concepts form
back to simmer on one of the back burners of our embroiling brains,
thus to focus primarily on the sign-like bits, characters, phrases,
strings, terms, or whatever linguistic expressions or notations we
are forced to attend to for the sake of computability, at any rate.
In short, we have the abstract term "POTIC", which at length finds
its proper exposition in the abstract term "Price Of Tea In China".
Now, there may be some readers of the phrase "Price Of Tea In China"
who would be led by its ostensible phrasing to think that the POTIC
has its being in that region of space and time that we call "China",
but let us put that potentially over-boiling pot of fish on another
back burner, and maybe have it for supper.
A tea-totalling economist can tell us that the index indicated by
the term "POTIC" is a value that is computed from samples of data
that are gathered from a geographically distributed population of
market exchanges and finanical transactions that "take place", as
we say, "over time", as we say again. Still, the POTIC indicator
that a statistician will steep out of this pot is not the sort of
thing we would want to say resides at any one of those individual
locales, even though all concrete physical signs of it take their
places, as we say, in leather-and-or-time-bound accounts, ledgers,
and registers of said statisticians.
On the other hand, do we really want to say that the POTIC exists
outside of space and time, that it exists in a realm beyond space
and time, if not the human imagination? It seems to me that such
a fanciful notion is just bound to brew up a host of absurd-i-tea.
But I will need some coffee to think on it further.
Jon Awbrey
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