At 10:11 AM -0500 1/17/08, Deborah MacPherson wrote:
........what Joe wants is impossible,
because there isn't anything useful to be said that applies to
everything. Anything non-trivial will be true of some things and
false of others: it will divide the universe into examples and
non-examples. It will be a category.
Do you see the point?
Pat
OK, I use the word boundary for this then.
What I'm asking about is a more general
process of elimination before that.
? Before selecting some part of the universe? Its hard for me to
see how one can be more general than that.
Narrowing down which data and
contexts
Apparently my point has not quite reached its target. To say
"Which...contexts..." presupposes that there is some large
collection or broad category of "contexts", from which
we need to select those of interest. My point is that there is no such
broad category: or, if you prefer, this category is simply
everything.
to consider even accessing or working
with in the first place, rather than starting from "everything"
aiming at only one category. Yes it fits the general theory/No it does
not.
There is no such general theory.
A human to human metaphor could be a
psychologist first interviewing a patient ruling out what the problem
is not before pinning down what it is, or Dustin Hoffman's character
eliminating huge swaths of literature by a few atypical questions in
the movie Stranger Than Fiction.
Common syntax, semantics, and pragmatics across many categories.
I have recently been looking at papers on mereology that seem to run
along these lines and would sincerely appreciate pointers to more on
THIS type of context and data processing currently in use
today.
WHAT type? Mereology is a general axiomatic approach (I can't say
theory as there are many of them) to the notion of 'parthood', the
relationship of parts of things to the wholes of which they are a
part. That is a fascinating topic, but it kind of stands on its own as
a particular topic, and doesn't suggest a natural generalization to
any particular 'type'.
Also, mereology has nothing particularly to do with
contexts, so I am baffled to understand what you are asking for.
I'd like to help, but I can't tell what it is you want to
know.
Pat
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