Re: abstractions & ontologies

[Tim Gwinn <***>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ROSEN Forum [mailto:*** Behalf Of John
> Kineman
> Sent: Thursday, April 01, 2004 12:46 PM
> To: ***
> Subject: abstractions & ontologies
>
>
> I had a bit of a breakthrough thinking through the adaptation/selection
> arguments and re-reading AS. I won't repeat that all here, as it opens
> too many questions that will naturally surface as our discussion
> continues. But I will raise a key issue which helped me cut through my
> muddle.
>
> In AS Rosen refers to "acts of abstraction." In a colloquial sense of
> the term "abstract" (as he points out most people intuitivly  consider
> it) I often imagined abstract to mean something vague and even expansive
> and in that way implicit of a broad ranging psyche. He points out that
> it is the opposite. An abstraction is equivalent to an observation,
> which is the basis of a model. It is thus a simplification of reality,
> not an expansion of it. I wonder how many other on the list were clear
> on this point. In that sense the observable world is also an
> abstraction, i.e., what constitutes the simple mechanistic model of
> reality. Other abstractions can be different from this one, and in that
> sense "broader" than it, but all are simplifications from many
> possibilities. Few would complain if I said our inner percepts of a
> spirit world are "mere" abstractions from reality, but how many fully
> grasp the extent to which sensory percepts are equally abstract, drawn
> from a more complex whole?
>
> This gets at the ontological aspects of the view.

Agree with you (and Rosen) about the nature of abstractions. But I question
whether this gets at the ontological view at all. Since we cannot step
outside of these abstractions, but only step into a different abstraction,
we remain confined - epistemologically speaking - within these abstractions.
Even the notion of there being a complex something 'out there' (i.e., "all
these abstractions must therefore be an abstraction OF something, right?"),
of which these abstractions are representative, is itself an abstraction.

This is why I was so taken with Hilary Lawson's book "Closure" (2001). It
provides a comprehensive view of our 'closures' (essentially, our
abstractions via modelling relations) that occur pervasively: intrapersonal,
individual, linguistic, religious, scientific, social, political, etc. And
yet, Lawson maintains consistency in that he does not claim to be somehow
'meta' to all this and is somehow telling us the 'real story' of reality,
but instead recognizes that this account is itself a closure.

Regards,
Tim