I’d refer to them as Abstract Objects and it turns out to … exist as a theory. You can call it an idea if you wish… and I know that’s more standard but…
…the justification for having these categorized as “objects” for me is I wish to bridge my knowledge of ontology from computer science with ontology in philosophy, which I consider to be a more primitive form or basis of the use of ontology in computing, which is more explicit and has spawned into some astounding new technologies in computed inference and such.
It’s a … classification or taxonomic difference in my view I think.
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You can reason about impossible ideas “as if” objects however. We do it all of the time.
Consider our use of symbols.
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Perhaps the question may be one of timing:
At which point do you cease speaking of abstract objects to ground them?
An interesting product of this way of thinking (which seems to have started with a philosopher/psychologist named Franz Brentano, has been
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School which is this notion of intentionality forming objects that can be construed of as real (and not just “as if real” to a bit of an extreme).
So it certainly can be dangerous.
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The creator of “Abstract Object Theory”, which allows reasoning with nonexistent objects as easily as concrete objects which seems to answer what I was attempting in the original post, has recently come up with:Automating Leibniz’s Theory of Concepts”Our computational metaphysics group describes its use of automated reasoning tools to study Leibniz’s theory of concepts. We start with a reconstruction of Leibniz’s theory within the theory of abstract objects (henceforth ‘object theory’). Leibniz’s theory of concepts, under this reconstruction, has a non-modal algebra of concepts, a concept-containment theory of truth, and a modal metaphysics of complete individual concepts. We show how the object-theoretic reconstruction of these components of Leibniz’s theory can be represented for investigation by means of automated theorem provers and finite model builders. The fundamental theorem of Leibniz’s theory is derived using these tool”https://mally.stanford.edu/Papers/cade.pdf
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“Object theory [19, 20, 22, 24] is an axiom system formalized in a syntactically second-order modal predicate calculus in which there is a primitive 1-place predicate E! (‘concreteness’). (Identity is not primitive; see below.) “”Intuitively, ordinary objects are the kinds of things we might encounter in experience. They only exemplify their properties, and the standard formulas of the classical predicate calculus are sufficient to represent claims about which properties and relations ordinary objects exemplify or stand in.But abstract objects aren’t given in experience; nor is there a Platonic heaven out there containing abstract objects waiting to be discovered. Instead, abstract objects are identified by the properties by which we conceive of them. For example, mathematical objects are abstract objects; the only way we can get information about them is by way of our theories of them.
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WAIT: DOES IT HOLD?WAIT: DOES IT HOLD?
“An concept is a theory of a category”: the group of words I’d been using for a while,… and now based on the above:
“An concept is a theory of a category”: the group of words I’d been using for a while,… and now based on the above:
A concept is a theory constructed of properties about an object which forms its identity when an abstract object which we can refer to as its “encoding”
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