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Hi Keith, Good answers to your questions will take some time. In the meantime.... As regards sloppy thinking and careless use of language - certainly I do it all the time (see!). I was talking about situations where people with hindsight might judge their thinking was not as unambiguous as they thought, or that what they said was faulty. Yeah, I'm referencing things to a research discourse based on formal approaches to reasoning and the avoidance of fallacies and sophism. I enjoyed the definitions in the glossary you referred to but they are pretty variable in quality (!) and in some cases the author indicates they are not so clear whether words are adjectives nouns etc. Perhaps the most unusual description is that of 'Yow' which points to http://zippythepinhead.com/pages/aaaunderstanding.html as a fuller explanation! I see this as two languages of design research - both necessary but with different purposes. The focus of the first is to be logical and unambiguous. The focus of the second is to communicate ideas in a simplified emotionally easy way. Cheers, Terry -----Original Message----- From: Keith Russell [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Friday, 24 February 2006 11:37 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: motives and the myths of reification Dear Terry I think you need to offer an account of "causal" which is probably much more the term at issue than "motivation". I'm not at all sure the computer people are taking "liberties" - they are more following the processes of reasoning. The status of the reflect-object and the reify-object are equally important which is also the case with "motivation" as object whether it be reflect-object or reify-object. Process logic offers an account of time/space/identity. The various ways in which identity shifts within systems indicates the conventions of the system much more than the time/space aspects. I'd like to see your account of these three abstracts in terms of their status within your account of causality. PS - Your reply suggests that sometimes people engage in sloppy thinking. Nobody is really that sloppy in their thinking - they are often unable to give an account of how their thinking works, but how they think, on inspection, is one of the possible ways of thinking. all the best keith >>> Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> 24/02/2006 1:49 pm >>> Hi Keith, I feel you are confusing and conflating two very different sorts of word explanations. On one hand are the careful definitions necessary to make reasoning in speech as unambiguous and as representative as possible in order to use reasoning as a tool for forecasting in a way that the use of the tool can be checked for correctness by others. On the other hand, the document you refer to is a glossary of rough explanations of terms to help a beginner in the use of what is relatively loose jargon. This glossary defines reflect and reify in a relatively ambiguous manner. In reality, the words are loosely-defined 'designer speak' - deliberately ambiguous verbal hand waving in this case to refer to aspects of programming. As I understand it, 'reify' is used in this context to refer to giving more status to part of a process than would otherwise be expected by giving that bit of process a title to itself( assign it to a variable) as a placeholder. 'Reflect' in contrast means to return some information to the main program path after doing a bit of work on the side. This is loose designer talk, taking liberties with 'English' in much the same way that an engineering designer might contrast a 'serious bit of structure' with a 'flimsy bracket'. This doesn't help either way with the concrete-abstract issue because computer software writing commonly blurs this issue by using the language of human interaction to give agency to program elements. How people design is a very complex phenomena that it is necessary to address in many dimensions, from many perspectives and using insights and theories from many domains. All of these discourses must necessarily integrate well. I find that minimising confusion is really helpful to enable careful verifiable reasoning about these issues. Using abstract entities in causal explanations as if these entities are real simply muddies the discourse and provides the basis for an easy drift into fallacious and sophist reasoning. Thoughts? Terry -----Original Message----- From: Keith Russell [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Friday, 24 February 2006 10:10 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: motives and the myths of reification Dear Terence I'm not sure it helps to make such distinctions as if the world were nuts and bolts and all the rest mere un-things. I have quoted a computer science distinction below that might help redeem abstract-concretes/concrete-abstracts from linguistics 101. I would hate to think that computer logic was allowed such subtle distinctions while philosophers have to do battle with the brute tools of "is this a dagger I see before my eyes?" all the best keith >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> reflect (v) ? the opposite of reify; to call a continuation. reify (v) to make something (specifically, a continuation or partial continuation) assignable to variable. What call-with-current-continuation does. http://community.schemewiki.org/?glossary