[Inquiry] Re: Attribute, Impute, Represent -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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AIR.  Discussion Note 24

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JA = Jon Awbrey
KM = Kirsti Määttänen

Re: AIR-DIS 19.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-April/002590.html
In: AIR-DIS.     http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-April/thread.html#2566

Kirsti,

Now that we may feel free to use sentences to talk about symbols,
without any taint of the brand of undue process that would force
us to confess to the syntactic sin of imagining that all symbols
are sentences, let's get back to the work of abstracting a sense
of what "of" may denote.

Our "two-times" table amounts to a collection of phrases of the form:
"2 times 1", "2 times 2", "2 times 3", "2 times 4", "2 times 5", ...,
as far as we happen to've learned it -- in my old school we memorized
it up to twelve or twenty, as I recall, perhaps due to the prominence
of dozens and scores in day-2-day commerce, or maybe just because we
were expected to grasp some sort of general pattern after that point.

Enlisting the corresponding paraphrases, that is to say,
"the double of 1", "the double of 2", "the double of 3",
and so on, we discern the constant part, "the double of"
from the variable parts, "1", "2", "3", ..., and in the
process begin to prescind the relative term "double of"
from the reference that the completed phrases have to
the various correlates to which we now conceive the
prescinded relative term "double of" to be applied.
Thus we form a more general conception of the term
"double of", abstracted from the matrix of more
concrete particulars.

With that much review, I'l try to push on next time.

Jon Awbrey

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