Hmm. Thanks all. A little wild and wooly – kinda messy – but interesting and fertile and maybe (?) significant. So, my apologies for pushing into this from an angle nobody’s ever heard of, but I think I’m staring at very solid confirmations of my earlier message from this morning. If any group ought to be able to get their definitions straight and consensual, it’s semantic ontologists. But this statement below goes right to my big simple-minded point. Unless we synthesize a common simple “zero-ambiguity” foundation based on something obvious – we are going to be roiling in a sea of relativistic semantics, with every term depending on every other term as propounded in some special case someplace or by some guru some of us have agreed to follow. That’s how the “humanistic disciplines” are organized. Everything is just personal opinion and “schools of thought” – with no reliable agreement and no sound grounding. This is more or less why the Vienna Circle wanted to throw out metaphysics. Does this matter in this ontolog context? Is this an issue of consequence that extends beyond high-tech competence in some esoteric zone? I think the answer is yes. Actually, it’s huge. We’re in a global world now, and relativistic definitions make everybody crazy. And without something we can agree on, and build on, that’s not going to change. So – this first statement goes to my fundamental distinction between “real object” and “abstract object” – and that “identity” is an abstract property inherent only in an abstract object: TOM: What is clear is that to say that something "in the real world ... has identity" is not clear. BRUCE: Yes, exactly. I’d say it’s not only “not clear” – it’s a systematic error to see it this way – at least if we are maintaining a distinction between “real object” (physical thing or situation) and “abstract object” (model of that thing). A very strong defense can be made of the case that “real objects” do not have “properties”. A “property” (attribute, characteristic, dimension, feature, etc.) is an intellectual abstraction assigned to experience by cognition. It’s my understand that John Sowa has been asserting more or less this general thesis since 1984, and I’ve been convinced since then that it is absolutely true. TOM: On an epistemological interpretation, it would seem to mean something like "can be identified", where it is some kind of conscious agent who could do the identifying. With Rich, I have no problem with this interpretation. BRUCE: Yes, exactly right. The “process of identification” has to be executed or performed by a “conscious agent” – who takes a measurement, makes an appraisal, assigns a value, asserts some attribute – and on the basis of that selected and abstract characteristic, assigns that value to an abstract model. If you have two adjacent and “similar” models, you now have unambiguous criteria for determining whether the two abstract objects are “similar” or “identical”. If they are “identical” – it is because the two objects have the have the same (“identical”) values in the same (“identical”) dimensions. All of that should be defined according to the general theory of measurements in a specified number of decimal places, with a defined error tolerance (ie, is 9.3874 “identical to” 9.3873999? – maybe yes, maybe no). Two grains of sand are “identical” if they have “identical” values in every dimension some conscious agent deemed significant, to within “acceptable” error tolerance. TOM: On an ontological interpretation, having identity is mysterious. Does a grain of sand "have" an identity in the same sense that it has size and weight? Or in the same sense that it has a location in space and time? If not, what does "has identity" mean? BRUCE: It looks to me like all these values and properties of the grain of sand are assigned by a “conscious agent”. The grain of sand itself has no “properties” – until we create those properties through a conscious volitional act of appraisal or measurement that assigns those properties to the object. That action is going on in a human mind – and maybe in a model created by that mind -- and by itself has nothing to do with the grain of sand – which could be appraised, as I believe John Sowa has often asserted, in an infinite number of ways, at widely varying levels of scale and dimensionality – all of which are created by the conscious agent, and do not inhere in the “real object”. *** Thanks for the conversation. - Bruce Schuman Santa Barbara |
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