From LOJBAN%CUVMB.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU Sat Mar 6 22:55:20 2010 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Tue, 2 Mar 1993 12:06:36 -0500 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 3537; Tue, 02 Mar 93 12:02:55 EST Received: from CUVMB.BITNET by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 3705; Tue, 02 Mar 93 12:08:47 EST Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1993 11:51:04 EST Reply-To: bob@gnu.ai.mit.edu Sender: Lojban list Comments: Warning -- original Sender: tag was bob@GRACKLE.STOCKBRIDGE.MA.US From: bob@GNU.AI.MIT.EDU Subject: TECH: Properties: historical example X-To: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu, bob@grackle.stockbridge.ma.us To: Erik Rauch In-Reply-To: John Cowan's message of Mon, 1 Mar 1993 17:54:56 -0500 <9303012341.AA11973@albert.gnu.ai.mit.edu> Status: OR X-From-Space-Date: Tue Mar 2 12:06:37 1993 X-From-Space-Address: @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Message-ID: ... 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)