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 transformation of "honey is sweet" into "honey possesses sweetness" can be viewed in several ways.

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

References

  1. ^ 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. on 1 November 2020 – via University of Florida.