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Single Idea 22287

[filed under theme 7. Existence / C. Structure of Existence / 7. Abstract/Concrete / a. Abstract/concrete ]

Full Idea

The word 'concrete' is often used as the negative of 'abstract', with the slightly odd consequence that desires and hallucinations are thereby classified as concrete.

Gist of Idea

If 'concrete' is the negative of 'abstract', that means desires and hallucinations are concrete

Source

Michael Potter (The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930 [2020], 12 'Numb')

Book Ref

Potter,Michael: 'The Rise of Anaytic Philosophy 1879-1930' [Routledge 2020], p.82

A Reaction

There is also the even more baffling usage of 'abstract' for the most highly generalised mathematics, leaving lower levels as 'concrete'. I favour the use of 'generalised' wherever possible, rather than 'abstract'.

The 17 ideas from 'The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930'

22273 Traditionally there are twelve categories of judgement, in groups of three [Potter]
22279 Frege's sign |--- meant judgements, but the modern |- turnstile means inference, with intecedents [Potter]
22281 A material conditional cannot capture counterfactual reasoning [Potter]
22283 Compositionality should rely on the parsing tree, which may contain more than sentence components [Potter]
22282 'Direct compositonality' says the components wholly explain a sentence meaning [Potter]
22284 'Greater than', which is the ancestral of 'successor', strictly orders the natural numbers [Potter]
22285 Impredicative definitions are circular, but fine for picking out, rather than creating something [Potter]
22291 Deductivism can't explain how the world supports unconditional conclusions [Potter]
22287 If 'concrete' is the negative of 'abstract', that means desires and hallucinations are concrete [Potter]
22290 The phrase 'the concept "horse"' can't refer to a concept, because it is saturated [Potter]
22295 Modern logical truths are true under all interpretations of the non-logical words [Potter]
22296 Compositionality is more welcome in logic than in linguistics (which is more contextual) [Potter]
22298 Why is fictional arithmetic applicable to the real world? [Potter]
22301 The Identity Theory says a proposition is true if it coincides with what makes it true [Potter]
22310 The formalist defence against Gödel is to reject his metalinguistic concept of truth [Potter]
22324 It has been unfortunate that externalism about truth is equated with correspondence [Potter]
22327 Knowledge from a drunken schoolteacher is from a reliable and unreliable process [Potter]