Hypostatic abstraction
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Hypostatic abstraction in
relation; for example "Honey is sweet" is transformed into "Honey has sweetness". The relation is created between the original subject and a new term that represents the property
expressed by the original predicate.
Description
Technical definition
Hypostasis changes a
abstract object
and a formal object.
The above definition is adapted from the one given by
predicative adjective or predicate into an extra subject, thus increasing by one the number of "subject" slots—called the arity
or adicity—of the main predicate.
Application
The grammatical trace of this hypostatic transformation is a process that extracts the adjective "sweet" from the predicate "is sweet", replacing it by a new, increased-arity predicate "possesses", and as a by-product of the reaction, as it were, precipitating out the substantive "sweetness" as a second subject of the new predicate.
The abstraction of hypostasis takes the concrete physical sense of "taste" found in "honey is sweet" and ascribes to it the formal
metaphysical characteristics in "honey has sweetness". This is the fallacy of reification[citation needed
].
See also
- Abstraction
- Abstraction in computing
- Abstraction in mathematics
- Analogy
- Category theory
- Continuous predicate
- E-prime
- Hypostasis (philosophy and religion)
- Reification
- Subsumptive containment hierarchy
References
- ^ CP 4.235, "The Simplest Mathematics" (1902), in Collected Papers, CP 4.227–323
Sources
- Peirce, C.S. Hartshorne, Charles; Weiss, Paul (eds.). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 1–6 (1931–1935). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
- Peirce, C.S. Burks, Arthur W. (ed.). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 7–8 (1958). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
- Zeman, J. Jay (1982). "Peirce on Abstraction". The Monist. 65 (2): 211–229. doi:10.5840/monist198265210. Archived from the originalon 1 November 2020 – via University of Florida.