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Full Idea
The natural view of chess is not that it is a non-spatiotemporal mathematical object, but that it was invented at a certain time and place, that it has changed over the years, and so on.
Gist of Idea
Chess may be abstract, but it has existed in specific space and time
Source
Gideon Rosen (Abstract Objects [2001], 'Non-spat')
Book Ref
'Stanford Online Encyclopaedia of Philosophy', ed/tr. Stanford University [plato.stanford.edu], p.4
A Reaction
This strikes me as being undeniable, and being an incredibly important point. Logicians seem to want to subsume things like games into the highly abstract world of logic and numbers. In fact the direction of explanation should be reversed.
| 8912 | Nowadays abstractions are defined as non-spatial, causally inert things [Rosen] |
| 8913 | Chess may be abstract, but it has existed in specific space and time [Rosen] |
| 8914 | Sets are said to be abstract and non-spatial, but a set of books can be on a shelf [Rosen] |
| 8918 | Functional terms can pick out abstractions by asserting an equivalence relation [Rosen] |
| 8919 | Abstraction by equivalence relationships might prove that a train is an abstract entity [Rosen] |
| 8917 | The Way of Abstraction used to say an abstraction is an idea that was formed by abstracting [Rosen] |
| 8916 | Conflating abstractions with either sets or universals is a big claim, needing a big defence [Rosen] |
| 8915 | How we refer to abstractions is much less clear than how we refer to other things [Rosen] |