I have a binary distinction that is a bit different from the distinction you’re drawing here. (Where tbc one might still draw another distinction like you do, but this might be relevant for your thinking.) I’ll make a quick try to explain it here, but not sure whether my notes will be sufficient. (Feel free to ask for further clarification. If so ideally with partial paraphrases and examples where you’re unsure.)
I distinguish between objects and classes:
Objects are concrete individual things. E.g. “your monitor”, “the meeting you had yesterday”, “the German government”.
A class is a predicate over objects. E.g. “monitor”, “meeting”, “government”.
The relationship between classes and objects is basically like in programming. (In language we can instantiate objects from classes through indicators like “the”, “a”, “every”, “zero”, “one”, …, plural “-s” inflection, prepended posessive “’s”, and perhaps a few more. Though they often only instantiates objects if it is in the subject position. In the object position some of those keywords have a bit of a different function. I’m still exploring details.)
In language semantics the sentence “Sally is a doctor.” is often translated to the logic representation “doctor(Sally)”, where “doctor” is a predicate and “Sally” is an object / a variable in our logic. From the perspective of a computer it might look more like adding a statement “P_1432(x_5343)” to our pool of statements believed to be true.
We can likewise say “The person is a doctor” in which case “The person” indicates some object that needs to be inferred from the context, and then we again apply the doctor predicate to the object.
The important thing here is that “doctor” and “Sally”/”the person” have different types. In formal natural language semantics “doctor” has type <e,t> and “Sally” has type “e”. (For people interested in learning about semantics, I’d recommend this excellent book draft.[1])
There might still be some edge cases to my ontology here, and if you have doubts and find some I’d be interested in exploring those.
Whether there’s another crisp distinction between abstract classes (like “market”) and classes that are less far upstream from sensory perceptions (like “tree”) is a separate question. I don’t know whether there is, though my intuition would be leaning towards no.
I have a binary distinction that is a bit different from the distinction you’re drawing here. (Where tbc one might still draw another distinction like you do, but this might be relevant for your thinking.) I’ll make a quick try to explain it here, but not sure whether my notes will be sufficient. (Feel free to ask for further clarification. If so ideally with partial paraphrases and examples where you’re unsure.)
I distinguish between objects and classes:
Objects are concrete individual things. E.g. “your monitor”, “the meeting you had yesterday”, “the German government”.
A class is a predicate over objects. E.g. “monitor”, “meeting”, “government”.
The relationship between classes and objects is basically like in programming. (In language we can instantiate objects from classes through indicators like “the”, “a”, “every”, “zero”, “one”, …, plural “-s” inflection, prepended posessive “’s”, and perhaps a few more. Though they often only instantiates objects if it is in the subject position. In the object position some of those keywords have a bit of a different function. I’m still exploring details.)
In language semantics the sentence “Sally is a doctor.” is often translated to the logic representation “doctor(Sally)”, where “doctor” is a predicate and “Sally” is an object / a variable in our logic. From the perspective of a computer it might look more like adding a statement “P_1432(x_5343)” to our pool of statements believed to be true.
We can likewise say “The person is a doctor” in which case “The person” indicates some object that needs to be inferred from the context, and then we again apply the doctor predicate to the object.
The important thing here is that “doctor” and “Sally”/”the person” have different types. In formal natural language semantics “doctor” has type <e,t> and “Sally” has type “e”. (For people interested in learning about semantics, I’d recommend this excellent book draft.[1])
There might still be some edge cases to my ontology here, and if you have doubts and find some I’d be interested in exploring those.
Whether there’s another crisp distinction between abstract classes (like “market”) and classes that are less far upstream from sensory perceptions (like “tree”) is a separate question. I don’t know whether there is, though my intuition would be leaning towards no.
I only read chapters 5-8 so far. Will read the later ones soon. I think for the people familiar with CS the first 4 chapters can be safely skipped.