On Dec 16, 2012, at 7:31 AM, William Frank wrote: (01)
> Flights are a great example, but a rather complex one. I believe that
>***many** human artifacts are of this same nature as flights. We define a
>pattern, and subpatterns, and individual instances of the pattern, Sometimes
>with intermediaries, but use them all like individuals of some sort. People
>have two separate concepts: individual (a characterization) and instance (a
>relationship). (02)
A side remark, but "individual" is often used simply to mean "playing the role
of an instance", so it is unwise to rely on this verbal distinction as always
having the meaning you ascribe to it here. (03)
> Take a book, like "Moby Dick". There are many different editions of Moby
>Dick, each edition has a number of printings, and each printing has a number
>of copies. Moby Dick itself has a life cycle, it was conceived, in writing,
>written, all knowledge of it lost, perhaps. Each edition has a life cycle,
>each printing also, down to each copy having a life cycle of its own. The
>same would be true of the 1973 Ford F-150. Also of a form like a credit
>application form. We define the template, then we fill it out and get
>something else, based on the template, so too for a class in a
>class-object-oriented programming language.
>
> As Hans and Mathew emphasize, the sine-qua-non of an **individual** is that
>it has a life cycle.
>
> Human artifacts are in this way unlike things in nature, like frogs, where we
>don't define the pattern, but FIND it. (04)
But frogs have a life cycle also, right? So why are they different "in this
way" from books? Seems to me that everything in the physical universe has a
life cycle. (05)
> So, whether one wants, for some philosophical reason, to deny
>individuality to anything but physical things, or to anything that can be used
>as a pattern for another thing, individual 'books' are very different from
>species of frogs (06)
But why? You have not made any case for there being a difference. If anything,
the opposite. The only difference you mention is that in one case we discover
"the pattern" and in the other case we make it., But that pattern, made or
discovered, is real in both cases and inherent in the individuality of the
individual in question. Your sine-qua-non applies to them both equally, and in
the same way. The matter of its naturalness or otherwise does not seem to be
very fundamental when we are talking about ontology. (07)
Unless you have some other point to make? (08)
Pat (09)
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