Why is ‘abstract idea’ like Wikipedia?

[coberst]

Why is ‘abstract idea’ like Wikipedia?

“Subject” is a word defining the human locus of consciousness, experience, reason, and will; “subject” is our human “essence” and everything that makes us who we uniquely are.

“Object” is a word defining something material that may be perceived by the senses.

I define these two words because there are many different definitions for these words but this is the definition I am using for these words in this discourse.

The qualities acquired by objects through association are what are normally called their expression. In the form or material of objects “there is one object with its emotional effect, in expression there are two, and the emotional effect belongs to the character of the second or suggested one.”

Many or perhaps most “things” that we find to be meaningful are objectified abstract concepts.

Examples of concrete concepts: the infant feeling warm and secure while being held following birth; being repelled by foul smelling stuff; the burden of carrying heavy stuff; observing the rise of milk in the measuring cub while watching mother make corn bread; noting that Grandma needs support while walking; getting knowledge while examining a tree.

Examples of abstract concepts: feeling warm when around my best fiend; telling a friend that the movie stinks; the feeling of being weighed down by troubles; the sense that stock prices are too high; I feel good when I support the troops; seeing a distant problem that might result.

Most of our concepts are abstract concepts and they are constructed from our concrete concepts. The more complex, broad, and sophisticated that our life style is the larger, more complex and sophisticated are our abstract concepts. Most of our concepts dealing with freedom, morality, politics, religion, justice, and history are abstract concepts.

Quotes from The Sense of Beauty: Being The Outlines of Aesthetic Theory by George Santayana

[AuntShecky]

This posting is quite interesting, as are all of your philosophical musings.

You are absolutely right in the multiple meanings of "subject" and "object." (I mean beyond the grammatical context, and even then many younger folks don't know the difference, with contemporary teachers of "language arts" believing that teaching grammar is a "waste of time.")

I am confused, however, when the terms such as "subjective" and "objective opinions" get tossed around.
I think I know the difference, but I'm not really sure. A subjective opinion would be one based on the opinion-maker's personal interest, whereas an"objective" opinion would be one in which the opinion-maker is unbiased and disinterested. Would that be correct?

The terms were really confused during the Women's Movement, if you are old enough to remember that. The "subjection" of women was the target, but at the same time some females railed against being treated as a "sexual object." In that sense, both "subject" and "object" were more or less synonymous.

[coberst]

Aunt



Humans have a vast subjective life; generally we construct this subjective life from our concrete or objective life. We make subjective judgment about such things as difficulty, morality, importance; we have subjective experiences such as desire, intimacy, and affection.

These subjective judgments and subjective experiences are generally constructed from concrete experiences, which are sensorimotor domains. A concrete experience contains mental structures that organize the experience in a manner such that inferences can be made. Also these concrete experiences contain the mental structure containing the sensorimotor actions that made the experience possible.

“When we conceptualize understanding an idea (subjective experience) in terms of grasping an object (sensorimotor experience) and failing to understand an idea as having it go right by us or over our heads. The cognitive mechanism for such conceptualizations is conceptual metaphor, which allows us to use the physical logic of grasping to reason about understanding.”

“Metaphor allows conventional mental imagery from sensorimotor domains to be used for domains of subjective experience.” The metaphors that I speak of here are conceptual metaphors and not linguistic metaphors. A conceptual metaphor is basically the mental structures of a concrete experience that is mapped from the concrete experience directly to the mental space which is becoming the subjective experience. It is like a linking operation that one sees so often on Wikipedia.

Quotes from Philosophy in the Flesh by Lakoff and Johnson