[MD] Ah-ha Qua Ah-ha

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Mark,

Matt said:
To _abstract_ is to make _independent_.  It is, in a word, _to isolate_.

Mark said:
Personally I see it much easier to view intellectualizing as creating.  I 
believe the Western world has the notion that something is being 
uncovered through the process. This is most common in the 
intellectualizing involved in science.

Matt:
Yeah, that puts the point as I would want to, but the relationship 
between abstraction and creation is still too distant to be quickly or 
easily understood.  It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately.  
When you isolate property A from object X, you are actually creating a 
new object (i.e., A), which has its own context and qualities and 
whatnot.  Western philosophy has been working itself in this direction 
(you can see it in Wittgenstein when he says in the Philosophical 
Investigations that philosophical problems are created by the 
transportation of perfectly serviceable concepts into different contexts), 
but it is still held back, as you point out, by the notion that "truth is an 
uncovering" (which is one way to translate the Greek word for truth, 
"aletheia") that is still encouraged by most of the rhetoric surrounding 
science.

Matt