Thanks,
What you say below seems clear, simple, educational, and unproblematic for me. there are things here I particularly like.
On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 3:22 PM, Matthew West <dr.matthew.west@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dear Frank,
More to the point, for me, what are the practical implications of limiting existential quantifiers to a particular category of the things we talk about?
MW: I make no attempt to do so. You may be confusing my remarks with those of JS.
I may have been confusing your remarks with those of many on these topics in these forums.
If you allow a category, then you can quantify over it as far as I am concerned.
Super.
I don’t allow a category called abstract individual. Under 4D I find it unnecessary. So in my scheme of things you cannot quantify over abstract individuals, but that is only because there are not any to quantify over.
I like this particularly. For me, if there were a category called 'abstract individuals, there would presumably be another one of 'concrete individuals', and I have never found the turtle at the bottom of the pile, or even a simple pile, more like a turtle network, not even a partial order.
In other words, how does it *help* to not let people say, 'there exists a rule, there exists a color, there exists a category of binary relations, called symetric relations? (Or, am I mistaken, and this is all OK -- but if it IS OK, then what is not OK?).
MW: Yes that is OK, just as long as those things do exist, and it is reasonable to argue that they exist (for you) if you wish to quantify over them (this is I believe essentially Quine’s definition of what it is to exist).
....
( I am not sure whether you choose to identify 'individuals' based on a relationship between those things and phenominological experience or between them and physics (which do seem to me to be miles apart, even though both are hard to grasp), but however you pick out the individuals from the non-individuals, how does it make people's understanding and description of the world easier and different from what it would be otherwise?
MW: Two key and related considerations in developing a coherent and comprehensive ontology are the fundamental kinds of thing that exist, and how you know if two of them are the same or different (identity).
Said very well. I take it from the below that you are also saying that having identity criteria and having a kind of thing that exists are bound together. This is what I learned, and have found to be very effective, from a practical point of view.
....
So, we might admit sets as a fundamental category, and we might have as the identity criterion that two sets are the same if they have the same members.
Now what can we come up with for things that exist in space-time? My choice is the spatio-temporal extent, quite literally any piece of space-time that might or might not be contiguous.
It is quite easy to see that you and I are pieces of space-time, and that because you and I are not coincident, that we a different objects. But what about say Barak Obama and The President of the United States. We can see that at the moment these two objects are coincident, but we probably want to say that they are not identical. One approach is to introduce abstract individuals and to say that the President of the United States is an abstract individual, and that Barak Obama is acting as the President of the United States. However, by adopting 4D with identity based on coincident spatio-temporal extents I can avoid this.
I would avoid it, too, even if I couldn't!
I think this is fine.
This is because although Barak Obama now is coincident with the President of the United States now, it is not true that Barak Obama for the whole of his life is coincident with the President of the United States from the declaration of independence to the present day and beyond. But then what is the spatio-temporal extent of the President of the United States? Well we already said that today Barak Obama was coincident with the President of the United States (so if today I have shaken the hand of Barak Obama, I have also shaken the hand of the President of the United States). We can therefore go back in time and see that the President of the United states consists of the states of the various persons holding the office whilst they held that office. The only thing you have to get over is that you can construct one object out of temporal parts of other objects.
This is interesting, but when you say it, clear and simple. Just as we construct objects out of spacial parts of other object, why not temporal parts.
Once you have done that though, you can do away with abstract individuals.
Never had them, never felt the loss, I would have been satisfied with
at time now, (that unique object that is president of the united states is the same as that unique object that is Barak Obama.)
But I see that treating space and time equivelently, time is not an predicate on the assertion, but should be distributed, so one could say:
that unique object that was president of the unitied states at time June 1962 is the same as that unique object that at time June 1945 was the captain of PT109.
This in my view is a useful simplification, since I am not at all sure what abstract individuals really are, whilst I am quite sure what spatio-temporal extents are.
--
William Frank
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