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TECH: Properties: historical example



    ... For the most part, properties have been "explained" by
    pointing to certain English words, typically ending in "-ness",
    and saying that "blueness" is "po/nu blanu". ...

    The property description ["ka" or "pu"] ...  is the least set of
    facts which would establish the truth of that predicated
    relationship if it were true.

    [The event abstractor, "nu" or "po"] abstracts a case, state,
    condition, or event of any length -- as long as an epoch or as
    short as a sneeze -- from some predicated relationship.

The history of biology illustrates the importance of changing from one
abstractor to another.

People once thought that a maple tree was as discontinuously different
from an oak tree in the same way that a triangle is different from a
quadrilateral.  The one could not change into the other.

But species do change from one to another.  The concept of species
refers to a state or condition of the instances of self-reproducing
entities and this state has a beginning, a duration, and an end.  Oak
trees evolved out of a different species and their decendents, if any,
will become another species.

If Darwin had written "The Origin of Species" in lojban, he would have
changed the abstractor for the concept of species from `ka' to `nu'.

Darwin trancended the presumptions of his time, in which most concepts
were understood in terms of property abstraction.

Property abstraction [`ka' or `pu'] comes out of the long
philosophical tradition of essentialism.  Regardless of the length of
the sides, a triangle is always a triangle.  A triangle is
discontinuously different from a quadrilateral.  To discover a
property abstraction, you ask, what is the essence?  What is the least
set of time-less facts that characterize the entity?  What
differentiates a triangle from a quadrilateral?

Essentialism helps bureaucrats, lawyers, mathematicians, and certain
kinds of scientist.  By looking for the essence, it is possible to
categorize an entity as one thing or another.  This is murder; that is
manslaughter: different essences; different penalties.  This
pearly-looking planet attracts the sun just as that reddish-looking
planet does; but neither color nor size is the essence; for Newton,
only the masses, distances, and velocities of the planets and sun are
important.

In the past, going back to Pythagoras and Plato, most philosophers
were essentialists in spite of their other differences.  Before
Darwin, most botanists followed the lead of the philosophers.
Naturalists looked at individuals and searched for that which was
similar among them: the naturalists looked for the minimal set of
time-free characteristics.  Darwin, by contrast, looked at individuals
in a population, saw that each individual was different from the
others, and figured out what the conseqences of the differences were
over time.  He saw a species not as an unchanging type, like a
triangle, but as an event, albeit of long duration.  Expressed another
way, he saw a species as a condition, a relationship among individuals
and their environments.


    Robert J. Chassell               bob@gnu.ai.mit.edu
    Rattlesnake Mountain Road        (413) 298-4725 or (617) 253-8568 or
    Stockbridge, MA 01262-0693 USA   (617) 876-3296 (for messages)