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CLASSICAL PHYSICAL ABSTRACTION

ABSTRACT. An informal theory is set forth of relations between abstract entities, including colors, physical quantities, times, and places in space, and the concrete things that have them, or are at or in them, based on the assumption that there are close analogies between these relations and relations between abstract sets and the concrete things that are members of them. It is suggested that even standard scientific usage of these abstractions presupposes principles that are analogous to postulates of abstraction, identity, and other fundamental principles of set theory. Also discussed is the significance of important disanalogies between sets and physical abstractions, including especially modal and temporal aspects of physical abstractions, which is related to the problem of the characterizing constancy, of colors, physical attributes, and locations in space.

1. INTRODUCTION The theme of this paper is that in spite of significant differences there are important logical resemblances between abstract sets in their relations to the concrete things that are in them, and abstract things such as colors, physical quantities (e.g., lengths and weights), times and even places, in their relations to the concrete things that have them or are at them. A fundamental resemblance has to do with the fact that ordinary usage, including ordinary scientific usage, presupposes rough 'postulates' of existence and identity for colors, physical quantities, times and places, that are analogous to the abstraction and identity postulates of set theory. These postulates not only describe the way in which abstract entities of given kinds are related to concrete things, but they are 'constitutive' of the abstract categories in the way that the set-theoretical abstraction and identity principles are constitutive of abstract sets. 1 Specifically, existence and identity and related criteria for abstract things are characterizable in terms of their relations to the concrete things that 'instantiate' them. 2 Given the foregoing, analyzing an abstract category becomes a job of formulating explicitly the existence, identity, and related postulates that are implicit in ordinary usage relating to the category, and studying their implications. Doing this would follow the example of Cantor and his successors in formulating principles that are implicit in 'we-analytic'
Erkennmis 38: 145-167, 1993. 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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uses of set concepts, and investigating their consequences. This paper will sketch aspects of this kind of analysis, though with far more modest objectives than Cantor's. Along the way, though, we will point out important dissimilarities between sets as they are conceived in mathematical set theory and physical abstractions like colors, physical quantities, times, and places. Let us begin with some down-to-earth examples. 2. EXAMPLES Think of a person making an omelet who has broken four eggs from a carton into a pan, and is about to break the fifth. Here are five things that the person might say about t h e egg: Sse, = The eggs that were in the carton included this one. Set,or = The color of this egg is not perfectly white. S g r a r n s = The weight of this egg is nearly 25 grams. Stime = The time of this egg's breaking will be before noon today. Splace = The place where this egg was in the carton is now empty.
Sset-Splace could have been expressed less abstractly of course; e.g., S~et could have been more simply expressed as:

S'set --- This egg was in the carton. But the less and the more abstract forms would be recognized as equivalent by the person-in-the-street. What is significant about abstract forms like S~et is that in saying that an abstract thing - a set, color, weight, time or place - has a property or stands in a relation to something, the abstract thing is referred to by a definite description that 'defines' it in terms of its relation to concrete things. Thus, Ssot describes the eggs that were in the carton in terms of its relation to the eggs that were in the carton, Seolou~describes the color of the egg by its relation to the egg, and so on. There are two things to note about this. First, assuming the Russellian analysis, the use of the definite article in referring expressions like 'the eggs that were in the carton', 'the color of the egg', and so on implies the existence of unique 'entities' satisfying the conditions of being eggs that were in the carton, color of this egg, etc. Therefore whatever these entities are, there must be existence and identity criteria that are applicable to them, which logical

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analysis should aim to formulate explicitly. 3 These will be commented on in the next two sections. Second, the fact that properties are ascribed to things like the eggs that were in the carton, the color of the egg and so on, is a first suggestion of theory. There are many sets, colors, weights, times and places, and theories of sets, colors, and so on generalize about these abstract things and their properties and their relations to other abstractions of like kinds. However, it is noteworthy that these theories do not usually explicitly formulate laws that describe relations between concrete things and the abstractions they generalize about. The theory of sets, based on the relation of membership, seems to be a rare exception to this rule. 4 Other theories such as of color, weight and other quantities or magnitudes give only the roughest hints at the principles that secure the existence of the abstractions in question. 5 But now we will have a first go at formulating principles of abstraction that are, arguably, implicit in abstract modes of expression like those in the examples.
3.
ABSTRACTION PRINCIPLES; FOUR DISSIMILARITIES TO THE

SET-THEORETICAL

Consider what would be presupposed in a Russellian analysis of 'the place where the egg was in the carton'. This clearly presupposes that there is a place where the egg was in the carton, and a first shot at an abstraction principle that would guarantee this is the following:

Place Abstraction Principle. For any concrete thing and any time, there is a place where the thing was, is, or will be at that time.
What is affirmed is the existence of a place standing in the relation of being where a concrete thing is, was or will be, and it obviously guarantees the existence of a place where the egg was in the carton. This is analogous to set theory's postulate that there are sets with certain things in them, and arguably to assumptions that there are colors, weights, etc., that things have, which are implicit in the use of expressions like Solor, Sg. . . . . and so on. It is significant that the Abstraction Principle neither formulates criteria of identity for places (it does not affirm that there is a unique place where the egg was) nor does it specify what a place is. Identity and uniqueness will be returned to below, but there

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are two observations to make first on the nature of the places whose existence is postulated in the Abstraction Principle, and on the status of the principle itself. Taking set theory as a model, we cannot expect abstraction principles to tell us any more about the entities they assure the existence of than the bare fact that they do exist, and that concrete things stand in constitutive relations to them. Ipso facto, they cannot tell us what the abstract things are like. They cannot tell us that a place is a surface, or that it has a particular weight or color. If we go farther and maintain that abstract things have certain properties or that they stand in certain relations to one another, even of identity, this must be justified b y principles that still remain to be formulated. 6 As to the status of the Abstraction Principle itself, I would hazard the following: namely that no ordinary justification can be offered for it, either a priori or a posteriori. Again taking set theory as a guide, the principle must be postulated and it cannot be derived from more 'fundamental' principles. 7 Nor can we 'tell by looking' that there is an abstract place where a concrete object is, since in looking at the place all we see are objects, s We ~will end this section by noting four important dissimilarities between the set-theoretical case and those of the physical abstractions involved in Scolor-Sp~ .... The first relates to the kinds of concrete things that can instantiate abstractions of the different kinds. Material bodies instantiate weights and places, and colored (non-transparent) ones have colors, but only events instantiate times. 9 These are all to some degree physical, and therefore it is appropriate to call colors and so on physical abstractions - though there are differences among them that can make it difficult to specify exactly what can instantiate physical abstractions of given kinds. 1 On the other hand anything can belong to a set (at least in typeless set theories), and that is what makes sets suitable for application to abstract mathematical objects. Another dissimilarity applies, perhaps, only to places and the spaces they are in. The Place Abstraction Principle implicitly assumes that everything has a place in a space, but there are actually many spaces, and we should formulate 'relative' place existence postulates that affirm the existence of places where things are in them. Thus the egg carton furnishes a space or 'frame of reference' of limited extent which has places in which small sized things can be at times, but these places and spaces are surely not the only ones whose existence is tacitly assumed

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in ordinary usage. However, we cannot in this brief sketch enter into the complications that multiple frames of reference introduce, or into the problem of characterizing connections between places in different frames. 11 The third dissimilarity has to do with the time-dependence of incidence relations involving physical abstractions. Obviously colors, weights and places, though not times, are things that concrete things can have or be at at one time and not at another, but set theory has no temporal dimension. 12 This means that the analysis of physical abstractions must face a difficulty that does not arise in the case of sets: namely that of specifying what it is for concrete things to instantiate the same abstract things at different times. This generalizes the problem of absolute space to colors and magnitudes, and it is no easier to solve in the latter cases than it is in the former. We will return to this briefly in section 7. The final dissimilarity is related to temporality. The egg was in a place in the carton but it is no longer there, and it is conceivable that there might have been places in the carton where nothing ever was or will be. The existence of such places cannot be deduced from the place abstraction principle formulated above, because that only guarantees the existence of places where concrete things have been or will be at some time. I will go out on a limb and postulate a more general principle that would assure the existence of these other places. Modal Place Abstraction Principle. For any possible thing existing at any time, there is a place where it would be at that time. Again, I would argue that this principle is presupposed in ordinary use, this time of counterfactuals involving referring expressions like 'The place where the egg would hit the ground if it were dropped'. The egg doesn't have to be dropped, ordinary counterfactual use presupposes, for there to be a place where it would hit the ground if it were dropped, and the existence of that place does not require that anything should ever actually be at it. Places are in 'container spaces', though the size of the container and what could be in it varies with the space. It is plausible that something similar applies to the other physical abstractions that we have been considering which, unlike sets, have a nonextensional aspect. Thus, we speak freely of the colors and weights that things would have under imaginable circumstances, and of the times of

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imaginable occurrences, and theories of these things are concerned with the colors, places, times, etc. of things and events that could possibly exist or happen. Thus, they are theories of physical possibilities. ~3 We will return to this, but we will first consider identity and uniqueness of physical abstractions, which will bring in another important disanalogy between them and sets.
4.
IDENTITY, UNIQUENESS AND PHYSICAL COINCIDENCE

An obvious principle of identity for abstract places is a modal analogue of the set-identity criterion:

Modal Place Identity Principle. Two places are the same if and only if no concrete thing could be at one without being at the other.
There are many places in the egg carton, and the modal formulation even allows for a multiplicity of empty places, in disanalogy to extensional set theory's single empty set. A place is empty if there is nothing in it, and there is more than one empty place if it is possible to put something into one of them which is not in other empty places. As with abstract existence, it is plausible that the categories of color, physical quantities, and of times also presuppose identity principles analogous to those presupposed by places, and that these allow for the existence of a multiplicity of uninstantiated colors, lengths, weights, times, and so on. In spite of having formulated criteria of identity for places, colors and other physical abstractions, we are not yet in a position to account for uniqueness, for instance, of what is referred to as 'the place where the egg was'. In one sense, in fact, the egg was not in a unique place in the carton because it was 'at' all of the places in the extended region it occupied. 14 Plausibly, in speaking of the place where the egg was, what we have in mind is a special one of these places, which we must now seek to characterize. I hazard that this is the place that is coextensive with the egg, which it fills, which can be indirectly characterized by giving the conditions for any object to be at that place:

Place Coextensiveness Characterization. One object is at a place filled by another object at a time if and only if it touches the other object at the time. 15

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If we assume as a matter of convention that an object must touch itself at any time, then the coextensiveness characterization implies that there must be a place filled by the object at that time, and the object must itself be at that place. Moreover this place must be unique, for if the object filled two different places there could be another object at one of these places but not at the other, and that would imply that the second object both touched and did not touch the first one. A very important thing about the coextensiveness characterization is that, unlike the abstraction and identity principles, it has an empirical aspect that the other principles lack because it refers to things touching one another, which is something that must be established by sense observation. Other empirical relations play analogous r6tes in theories of color, physical magnitudes and time, since we have observational means for determining when two things match in color, weight or length, and when two events overlap in time. 16 What is significant about these relations is that while sense observation establishes that they hold between concrete things, it also establishes that the same abstract thing is incident in both of them: i.e., it establishes that they are coincident. Thus, things that touch at some place, things that match in color have an abstract color in common, things that match in weight or length have an abstract weight or length in common, and overlapping events overlap at a time. This 'dual interpretation' of coincidence, either as a binary empirical relation between concrete things, or as a ternary and partly abstract relation between the concrete things and an abstract thing that they have in common, 17 gives to theories of physical abstractions an empirical aspect that set theory lacks, since the same set being incident in two concrete things has no empirical 'meaning'. There are two other things to note about coincidence. One is that, as is incidence, most coincidence relations are time-dependent, and the problem of analyzing diachronic coincidence (the same abstract thing being incident in different concrete things at different times) is essentially the same as the problem of analyzing 'absolute' constancy and change that was referred to earlier, and which will be returned to in section 7. The other point is that coincidence relations have to satisfy observationally testable laws that it is part of the job of analysis to investigate. Obviously being at the same place - touching - is symmetric, as are color, weight and time matching. Weight and length coincidence are also supposed to be transitive - they are equivalence relations. Place,

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color, and time-matching are not always transitive, but there is reason to think that these are involved in even more complex laws which in some cases still remain to be studied. However the failure of transitivity is itself important, as we will now see.

5.

UNEXTENDED

ENTITIES

AND

GENERALIZED

COINCIDENCE

The non-transitivity of touching means that two things can touch a third thing without touching each other, the non-transitivity color matching of means that two things can match a third thing without matching each other in color, and the non-transitivity of time-overlap means that two events can overlap a third one in time without overlapping each other. But there are things that might satisfy a kind of transitivity condition: that other things that touched them, matched them in color, or overlapped them in time would necessarily have to touch each other, match each other in color, or overlap in time. These are unextended, perfectly point-like things: spatial points, instantaneous events, and, in the case of colors, perfectly uniformly colored objects. Two things that touched an object that occupied only one spatial point would have to touch each other, two events that overlapped an instantaneous event in time would have to overlap each other, and two things that matched a perfectly uniformly colored or monochromatic thing would have to match each other. Of course we don't think that there are any objects so small as to occupy a single spatial point, and we may be skeptical of the existence of instantaneous events or of perfectly monochromatic objects, and this leads to a problem. We conceive of space as filled with unextended points that satisfy the following:

Unextendedness condition. A place is unextended if and only if any two things at that place at a time would have to touch each other at that time.
Similarly, we think of time as filled by temporal instants, and perhaps of 'color space' as composed of perfect monochromes, which satisfy unextendedness conditions analogous to the above. But we noted that there is no reason to think that there are any instantaneous events, perfectly monochromatic bodies, or unextended concrete things (if a

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concrete thing were unextended then any other concrete things touching it would have to touch each other, and that would imply that the first thing had to be 'infinitesimally small'), is The existence of unextended abstract places, times and colors is not guaranteed by the abstraction principles formulated previously, and therefore if we conceive the spaces of place, time and color to be filled by these unextended abstract things there must be other principles implicit in ordinary discourse that guarantee their existence. Assuming this, analysis should seek to make the basis of these 'limit myths' clear, and we will make very brief observations on this. First, our program is to formulate existence principles that are already implicit in 'pre-theoretical' conceptualizations, and not necessarily to construct ideals like points and temporal instants by mathematical means, such as Whitehead's method of Extensive Abstraction. 19 As a matter of fact, one implicit existence principle has already been assumed, namely a
Place coincidence principle. Two concrete things touch at a time if and only if they are at the same unextended place at that time. 2

The idea is that we conceive of physical objects as touching if they touch or 'meet' at a point. Similarly, objects match in color if they share a monochromatic color, and events are contemporaneous if they overlap at a common temporal instant. Assuming these coincidence principles, it follows from the fact that concrete things touch, match in color or overlap in time that unextended places, colors and times exist. Among many questions that can be raised about unextended ideals, we may ask why physical coincidences should be conceived in terms of them, and why we should populate the world not only with places, colors and times, but with unextended, ideal ones that are not instantiated by anything concrete. This is a very difficult question, but the answer may lie in the following direction. We often assert that more than two concrete things 'meet' in an unextended abstract point, as when we say that the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah meet at the Four Corners. However it is harder to explain what we see when we observe that more than two things are coincident than it is to explain two-body coincidence (touching). For instance, the reader might ask her or himself what 'test' would show that the three segments forming the figure ' ~ ' meet in a common point, while those

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forming the figure '_~_' do not. It is evident that we have observational means of determining these things, which is part of the job of conceptual analysis to analyze, but the complexity of this analysis may explain why we use the meet-in-a-common-point idiom to 'represent' this conceptually. This is speculative of course, but we cannot pursue this matter farther here. 21 The final sections of this paper will comment speculatively on three other matters.
6.
CONSTRUCTABILITY AND THE LIMITS OF ABSTRACT

EXISTENCE

Having formulated principles that guarantee the existence of unextended places, colors, and times, whose existence is not guaranteed by the 'basic' abstraction principles formulated in section 3, we may ask: are there still other abstract places, colors, quantities and so on and other principles guaranteeing their existence, which are tacitly assumed in everyday life or in science, and how large are the classes of abstract entities whose existence is thus guaranteed? This section will suggest that while there may be no precise answer to this question, these classes are limited by the fact that their members must be 'distinguishable' in terms of their relations to concrete things whose existence is physically possible, and which in many cases it is possible to construct. Roughly: the constructable concrete limits the abstract existent in the sense that any two distinct abstract entities must stand in distinct incidence relations to constructable things. The foregoing applies to points in the Euclidean plane. Though they may not be constructable in any ordinary sense, = nevertheless any two of them are differentiated in a manner analogous to that in which real numbers are differentiated by their relations to rational numbers. In particular, any two points are 'separated' by lines that can be produced by standard geometrical methods. 23 While this 'distinguishability requirement' does not define the class of points in the plane, it limits it. 24 Next consider lines. Straight lines are simplest, since they are uniquely determined by pairs of points on them, and point-pairs can be distinguished 'constructively' .22 Given Ancient Greek controversies concerning the general concept of a line (circles, parabolas, etc., cf. Heath, 1956, Vol. I, pp. 158-165) and the long controversy over the nature of a function, it may be imagined that lines in general are much more difficult than points. In fact, if the genus line included geometrical loci

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such as the class of points on a straight line at algebraic distances from a given origin, there would be no way to distinguish that point set 'constructively' from the set of all points on the line. But it is intuitively doubtful that we would consider such an irregular point set as a line, and, as said, I speculate that loci that would be recognized to be lines are all constructively distinguishable. 26 This technically difficult topic cannot be pursued here, and we will end this section with brief remarks on the other physical abstractions that we have been concerned with. That there are constructive methods of circumscribing quantitative abstractions like weights and lengths is guaranteed by Archimedean conditions, which postulate that these quantities can be added, and if they are added sufficiently many times they will exceed any given magnitude - there are neither infinitesimal nor infinite magnitudes. 27 I suggest that the producibility operations for colors are color mixing processes, primarily of pigments but also of lights. It is possible to match any given hue by a suitable, measurable mixture of pigments of the primary hues, 28 and the possibility of matching by measurable pigment mixtures delimits the class of possible hues and thereby locates them in a 'color space'. As to time, the most obvious time-locating processes involve natural periodic phenomena such as the succession of days and nights, seasons, etc. Of course these periods do not encompass 'all of time', and there were events that preceded the formation of the solar system and no doubt there will be ones that succeed its dissolution. But oscillations of cesium atoms allow the dating of events beyond the compass of solar phenomena, and it is plausible that in even in the 'high energy soup' of the Big Bang there were periodic processes that furnished a potential time-frame. 29 In short, though it appears that it is Nature and not people that 'constructs' them, regular successions of events 'measure' all of time and thereby delimit the class of possible temporal abstractions. 3 As with other difficult topics, we cannot go farther into the limits of the abstract and its relation to constructability here, and we now turn briefly to a topic introduced in section 3: namely that of constancy and change. 7.
CONSTANCY AND CHANGE

This section will suggest that the analogy between change in color or physical magnitude and change of place goes deeper than has often

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been supposed. Leibniz argued in section 47 of the Fifth Letter " Samuel Clarke that change of place is a matter of something changing its position with respect to objects that maintain constant positions relative to each other, and a case can be made that change of color or magnitude is similar: it is essentially a matter of a thing chariging its coincidence relations to 'standards' whose coincidence relations to one another are invariable. First consider colors and color-fastness: the property of a thing that does not change its color over time. What distinguishes these things from others is that if they match other color-fast things at one time then they do so at other times, while non-color-fast things change in color relative to one another. This is evident in the case of Munsell charts, which are used as reference standards when 'objective' color determinations are required. Color-fastness is relative of course, since color standards are occasionally harmed or destroyed, but in general they are more permanent in their matching relations than other things are. 31 Is there any more to color-constancy than the sort of relative constancy that color-standards exhibit? Following the example of spatial constancy (being at rest in space), I will hazard that to a first approximation there are no other 'facts of the matter' that make standards that are unchanging relative to each other the right criterion of color constancy and change. This is, in effect, to espouse a relational account of color. More will be said about this at the end of this section, but for now it is at least supported by the analogy to relational theories of space. 32 As to physical magnitudes, it is clear that standards like measuring rods and standard weights maintain quite constant length and weight coincidence relations. Marks on measuring rods that 'fit' at one time also fit at others, and standard weights that balance at one time do so at other times too. And, these standards are much more constant than non-standards. For instance, people are measured in height and weight by comparison with standards, but they change in height and weight relative to each other while the standards do not. Whether there are more ultimate facts of height and weight constancy will be returned to, but again the parallel to relativity of motion makes a prima facie case for the relativity of constancy and change in physical magnitudes. It is worth making a further comment on change of place, even though that is the example that inspires our relational approach to

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constancy and change in other physical abstractions. Leibniz advanced the 'relativity thesis' as an account of change of place in Space, and not necessarily of change of place in other frames of reference such as the surface of the earth or the matter of which it is formed. On the contrary, we often think of the surface of the earth as a fixed background space or 'stage', on which the events of history are played out. But Weyl made an important observation:

in a completely homogeneous substance without any quality the recognition of the same place is as impossible as that of the same point in homogeneous space. (Weyl, 1949, p. 165)

I interpret this as suggesting that what is true of Space is just as true of material bodies and their surfaces. We require standard 'reference features' such as rivers, hills, survey markers, and the like to determine sameness of place on the earth's surface just as much as we do to determine sameness of place in Space, and sameness of color or magnitude. 33 But there is a problem with the relational theory of place, color and magnitude that must be noted, even though we cannot attempt to resolve it. The recognition that standards maintain invariable coincidence relations to one another requires us to 're-identify' these standards on different occasions, and if Weyl's suggestion is right we can only do that if they have some of the same qualities on these occasions (sameness of substance determined by sameness of qualities). 34 But we cannot appeal to the invariability of coincidence relations to other standards to determine the qualitative invariability of the standards themselves, and it could seem that at some stage we must be able to recognize the 'intrinsic' invariability of the standards, independently of their coincidences with other standards. My impression is that this is too simple, but it does show that the problem of analyzing qualitative and quantitative invariability and that of analyzing individual identity over time may ultimately be inseparable. We conclude this paper with comments on two ways in which the conceptual systems of modern science appear to be evolving away from the 'classical model' that we have attempted to describe in the preceding sections.

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NON-CLASSICAL

In the last century scientific concepts, especially quantitative ones, have come to be learned more in the laboratory than from ~textbook definitions' in terms of familiar concepts, and we might expect this to be reflected in the principles of application of the concepts in question. In one respect this is certainly the case. The standards employed and the methods of determining coincidence relations to them are far more refined now than they were one or two centuries ago, and it is doubtful that these methods can be taught by verbal instruction alone. 35 This could explain the trend in modern science towards not giving 'ordinary language definitions' of fundamental concepts like length and mass: i.e., of not making their principles of application explicit. Genuinely new ideas cannot be fully explicated in terms of old concepts, and it is possible that classical principles of application do not apply to them. On the other hand we use old words like 'five pounds' to express the new concepts, and this may reflect the fact that the logic of their application is similar to the classical form that we have been sketching. We still assume that concrete objects have abstract metrical properties like weight and length, which are referred to by phrases of the forms 'the weight o f . . . ' , ' . . . the length o f . . . ' , etc., and therefore we still presuppose principles of abstraction relating them to these concrete things, though now knowledge of these things and of the coincidence relations between them may only be acquired through specialized training. But so long as the logic remains the same, something like the classical abstract metrical ontology is still with us. In fact, that ontology is now augmented by quantities like pound-feet that were not recognized in earlier times, and which have their own principles of application. The classical abstract conceptual scheme has evolved, but so far it has not been totally discarded. 36 However, more radical changes have been advocated. There have been attempts to carry out programmes in science similar to the program of reducing the disparate pre-Cantorian ontology of mathematics to one of sets alone. It is a step in this direction to describe spatial positions in terms of distances from coordinate axes, for if the axes themselves can be considered to be concrete things and distances from them can be considered as 'pure numbers', we have eliminated place as an abstract category in favor of number. If numbers are reduced to sets in any one of a number of familiar ways, everything is apparently reduced to a thing-and-set ontology.37

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The foregoing fits in with 'representationalist' approaches to fundamental measurement (e.g., Krantz et al., 1970), which has much to recommend it. In this approach a statement like 'the distance from x to y is 25 feet', which refers to the abstract quantity 25feet, is replaced by 'the value of the distance-in-feet function for the arguments x and y is 25', which refers the pure number 25, that differs from the 'denominate number' 25feet. This has the advantage of obviating the need for 'denominate number arithmetics' that in many ways reduplicate pure number arithmetic, but which involve such curious rules as 'like can only be added to like' (e.g., feet can only be added to feet) but sometimes 'like can be multiplied by unlike' (e.g., feet can be multiplied by pounds) .38 The reductionist program just noted has only met with limited success to date, possibly because conceptual inertia militates against learning new ways of speaking when old ones will serve. But it is also possible that this or a similar program will ultimately be accepted by the scientific community, which will mean that the classical abstract ontology will be largely abandoned, just as the disparate pre-Cantorian ontology of mathematics has largely been abandoned. However, I cannot refrain from ending with a comment on something that I think must be faced when and if the classical abstract ontology is finally replaced. Constructability is part and parcel of the conceptual scheme that I have tried to outline, and I suggest that nothing that fails to do justice to it can be regarded as an acceptable reformulation of scientific doctrine. If this is so it means that scope must be given to what transcends the actual existent, and it is implausible that that can be described in terms of purely extensional abstractions like sets. On the other hand, the extent to which science will in the future make use of 'classical' non-extensional abstractions like places, colors, magnitudes and times cannot be foretold. 39
NOTES 1 The analogy between principles of abstract application to the concrete and set-theoretical abstraction is one indication of how far the 'set-theoretical model' of the abstract departs from once popular views of applied theories as 'interpreted formal systems' or as formal calculi a u g m e n t e d by 'semantic rules'. O n the other hand our departure from Positivist views is at the farthest remove from recent anti-formalist, 'historicist' outlooks. 2 W e shall use the generic term instantiate for the relation between the concrete object and the abstract place, color, weight, or what-have-you that it is at or it has, and we

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shall call the converse relation incidence. Thus, the abstract color, weight, etc. is incident in the concrete thing that instantiates it. 3 Can the Russellian analysis apply to all similar uses of the definite descriptive form, as in 'He is repairing the hole in the roof'? To assume this would be to populate the world with a superabundance of dubious entities such as holes. We won't address this matter, but only confine our attention to entities that at least have the respectability of having been theorized about - such as sets, colors, places, and so on, as below. However, this test is equivocal, since before Cantor (maybe Boole) no one theorized about sets, yet the foundation in everyday usage was there, waiting to be seized upon for the mathematician's purposes. Why not have included other abstract things that clearly have been theorized about, such as biological species, material substances, maladies or shapes? Speculating, much of what will be said about colors, places and the like does apply to these 'natural kinds', but they are less well defined in a way that will be important to us here: there are less clear 'limits of the possible', such as of possible biological species. Note 30 also alludes on this. 4 The theory of ratios developed in Book V of Euclid's Elements may be another exception. See also medieval theories such as that of Oresme (Claggett, 1968). 5 Thus Newton, following Plato, held that the Absolutes of his theory can only be known by 'abstracting from the senses' (Scholium to fundamental definitions Book I of the Principia, p. 8 of Cajori edition, 1934), which formulates a modus operandi of abstract theorizing when theory does not state its principles of application, existence and identity explicitly. Something similar can be said for abstract theories of numbers. It remained to Cantor to formulate principles of application and existence for pure arithmetic, as a theory of 'second-level abstractions': of entities, the positive numbers, that stand to first-level abstractions - i.e., to sets - as abstractions like color and place stand to concrete things. Kronecker's Intuitionism can be regarded as the analogue of Plato's and Newton's Geometrical Idealism in the realm of pure mathematics. 6 It is a merit of set theory's abstraction principle to make this manifest; and also, where theory does ascribe properties and relations to sets, to define them explicitly. I hypothesize that a fundamental fault of classical metaphysics was to suppose that an account of abstractions like colors, places etc. must tell us what these things are like. 7 Again, this seems to me better than, say, positing that space and its properties are psychologistic Anschauungen. The principles that apply to them may be synthetic and a priori, but to go beyond that is gratuitous speculation without the justification of being rooted in ordinary usage. Russell's slur that postulation 'has all the advantages over construction that theft has over honest toil' seems to me too simple. Construction aims, among other things, at showing the consistency that postulation only postulates, but in formulating what is already implicit in ordinary use the Abstraction Postulate gains the plausibility that that use confers on it. Moreover, it is an advantage of postulation over construction not to impute gratuitous form to that which is postulated - not to make numbers be sets, and
SO o n .

All of this does not mean that Occam's Razor is to be dispensed with. Theory normally systematizes, extends, and if necessary revises pre-theoretieal practices, and in the process

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takes on more than ordinary usage is committed to, including such requirements as consistency and fruitfulness - i.e., suitability to the theoretician's purposes. Failing to satisfy these requirements, or not satisfying them as well as another theory does (which is something that may only become apparent over a period of time), a theory 'constituted' by an abstract existence principle should, rightly, be discarded. But not on a priori metaphysical grounds. s Perhaps we may call the Abstraction Principle a meaning postulate because it makes explicit what seems to be implicit in the use of expressions like 'the place where the egg was in the carton'. Certainly the readiness with which abstraction principles for places, sets, and the like are accepted would seem to be a matter of how 'comfortable' we are with pre-theoretical uses of the corresponding definite descriptions, which on a Russellian analysis presuppose the existence of the entities in question. 9 The term 'event' may be too temporally restricted: we also wish to include things like wars and glacial eras, which can be of very long duration. 10 Two examples bring this out. First, not only bodies but bodies' surfaces, cavities in them, and a fair range of other things have places, and it is not easy to circumscribe the class of 'placeable things'. Second, it is customary to say that light is colored, yet lights are very different from bodies and it is only with difficulty that we match their colors to those of bodies. 11 Nor can we enter into the question of whether ordinary usage tacitly assumes the existence of a 'universal space' that has a place for everything in it. Of course the existence of a unique universal space was assumed in classical Natural Philosophy, (e.g., in Newton's theory and in the Critique of Pure Reason, p. 69), though this contrasts with the plurality of physical reference frames that came to be accepted in late classical physics and in Relativity (though it is worth noting that classical Euclidean geometry did not refer explicitly to Space). Something analogous to the relativity of place arose in certain medieval theories of weight, according to which there were 'frames of weight reference'. Thus, weights were conceived of as being in media - e . g . , weights in air, weights in water, etc (see the 14th cent. pseudo-Arcliimedean work Liber Archimedis de Insidentibus in Humidum in Moody and Claggett, 1952). How close the analogy is between the relativity of weight to a medium and the relativity of place to a space is something that cannot be entered into here. 12 That is to say that mathematical set theory has no temporal dimension, for the obvious reason that its objects are timeless things like numbers; it is not to say that everyday 'pretheoretical' ideas of class and set have no temporal aspect. Admitting that things can have attributes at one time but not at another and that the extensions of attributes are sets suggests that non-mathematical sets might be allowed to acquire and lose members. However, this possibility is ignored in informal set theories that purport to apply to nonmathematical things, and we might be inclined to say that these theories deal with a different set concept than the person-in-the-street does. But to put it that way would draw attention away from the fact that latter's usages are what win the theory's initial acceptance. 13 As such they run counter to a tradition that denies existence to all but actually instantiated places, colors, times and so on. This includes the denial of the possibility of the void, of shades of color never perceived, and of times outside all experience.

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The Big Bang is said to mark the beginning of time, on the grounds that that was the beginning of the physical universe. However, that may mark a theoretical limit to the possible - the bounds of the container space of time - which will be returned to in section 6. 14 Properly, we should say that the egg stood in different incidence relations to these different places (itfilled the compartment at the same time that it was at the other places), and we should formulate different abstraction principles corresponding to the different kinds of incidence. We are not prepared to enter into these complications in this brief overview. 15 This is the kind of place that Aristotle attempted to describe or 'circumscribe' as 'the boundary of the surrounding medium'. Among other drawbacks, this presupposes that there is a surrounding medium and that that medium doesn't itself have a place that could be circumscribed in the same way. 16 It must not be thought that any of these relations is simple, since analysis reveals messy details in all of them. Color matching is a very complex matter, Munsell chart comparisons being perhaps the most refined visual inspection method, but not only is that complicated, but it applies only to the colors of objects and not to those of lights, which are the primary things compared by spectrographic analysis. Weight coincidence is defined by methods like comparison on the pans of a chemical balance, but details are again messy and they are complicated still more by the fact that weight is now defined in Physics as the force of the earth's gravitational attraction for an object, which makes weight comparison a special case of force comparison. Contemporaneity (overlapping in time) went essentially unexamined prior to Einstein's stunning analysis, which showed that certain empirical assumptions involving it had to be revised. None of these things can be entered into in detail here, but it should be clear that careful study of any particular abstract category must pay especially close attention to them. Section 8 will return to the evolution of coincidence determination methods. 17 In the Foundations of Arithmetic, par. 64, Frege stressed a similar point about the relation of parallelism between fines, which can be interpreted either as a binary relation between lines, or as a ternary relation between the lines and a third thing, the direction that they have in common. 18 A small dot such as that in the quotes '.' comes close to,satisfying the unextendedness condition, since any two things touching it come close to touching each other. No doubt that is why we represent points by these point-like things, and it is probably the inspiration for conceiving ideal points to be limits. But to be point-like is to have a small extension and not to be unextended, and our job is to explain unextended abstractions. T h e following footnote comments on attempts to 'construct' points as one or another kind of limit. 19 The list of attempted constructions or representations of geometrical and spatiotemporal minima, beginning with Berkeley's minima visibilia, and passing by way of constructions suggested by Poinear6, Russell, Nicod, and Carnap to Goodman's 'topology' of subjective qualities is too long to be considered in detail. These are all subject to the same objection: namely that the things constructed are not shown to have any necessary connection with the things that are ordinarily conceived to be points. Another approach to spatial minima can also be criticized on these grounds. They might be postulated to be the places of the unextended 'mass points' that physical theorists

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have sometimes theorized about (cf. Newton, Principia, Book II, Proposition XXIII, Theorem VXIII or Maxwell, 1877, p. 2) which would also fit in with Euclid's definition ' A point is that which has no part' (Elements, Book I, Definition i, Heath, Vol. 1, p. 155). But the concept of a mass point is not grounded in everyday usage, and therefore justifying the existence of spatial points by reference to them would be to justify the familiar in terms of the obscure. 2o This principle presupposes that the boundaries of concrete things 'belong' to the things they are boundaries of; i.e., that the point sets to which the things correspond are topologically closed (Kelley, 1955, p. 40). If concrete things didn't contain their boundaries - say they were like the interiors of spheres - then they could be 'zero distance apart' without having points in common. 21 Adams (1974) and (1986) propose analyses of empirical methods of multi-thing coincidence determination. The latter paper also shows how these methods and their principles of abstraction not only justify the claim that unextended spatial abstractions exist, but that there are uncountably many - a continuum - of them. 22 But the point placing operation spoken of in Proposition 2, Book I of The Elements might be interpreted as a kind of construction. Cf. the comments on this in Heath 1956, Vol. 1, p. 24. 23 This is closely related to separability conditions for topological spaces (cf. Kelley, 1955, p. 48). The simplest separability condition is that there should be a countable set of points that is dense in the space in the sense that every 'neighborhood' in the space contains a point of this countable set. Countability is closely related to constructability, because it is a property of iterated operations of construction. 24 In particular, it limits it to the cardinality of the continuum. However, we are not entitled to assume that the class of points is maximal in that it includes a maximum number whose existence would be consistent with being distinguishable in the manner considered (cf. Hilbert's Completeness Postulate). As with the class of constructabilia itself, the class of abstract existents might best be regarded as a primitive of geometrical theory. 2s Note that it is a measure of the abstractness of these lines that different 'drawings' of their parts are not conceived to construct different lines. It is significant that even Euclid's very constructive geometry theorized about lines that are clearly not constructable, and specifically about infinite straight lines (of. Proposition 12 of Book I, (Heath, 1956, Vol. I, p. 270). Nonetheless, these non-constructables can be distinguished by reference to extended and finite constructables. 26 For instance, it is plausible that lines correspond to sets of points that are closed in the topology of the plane. The set of points on a line whose distances from an origin is an algebraic number is not closed, and it is possible that any two different closed point sets are constructively distinguishable. 27 Book V of Euclid's Elements makes this clear, and recent 'representational' theories of extensive measurement assume essentially the same thing (cf. Condition 4 of Definition 1, p. 73, in Krantz et al., 1970). The generic term now commonly used for physical addition (of weights, lengths, etc.) is concatenation, but it is noteworthy that where traditional formulations affirmed that weights or lengths can be added, modern 'extensional' formulations presuppose that they are added (i.e., that there exists something equal to the physical sum of two things). Here the moderns follow Helmholtz ('Numbering

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and Measuring', 1887), who, himself following earlier developments, had to contend with distinguishing so called 'denominate numbers" like 5.i pounds from "pure numbers' like the number 5.1 - a problem that the ancient Greeks. lacking modern concepts of pure numbers, did not have to face. Confusing producibility with existence results partly from conflating the producible concrete with the existent abstract. Another cause for this arises from the fact that for Euclidean constructions at least, constructabiliO, quantifiers of the form 'It is possible to draw (produce, describe, etc.) something such that.." can be paraphrased as existential quantifiers over classes of "constructable things', e.g.. as "There is a drawable (producible, describable, etc.) thing such that..', where the classes of constructabilia are best regarded as primitives of Euclidean theory. This representation of constructability as 'existent constructability' is not trivial, since it excludes constructional conflict, as when the construction of a building would conflict with the construction of a parking lot in the same space. 2s In measurement theoretic terms this sort of "color location process" is a derived measure, since it depends on fundamental measures of the quantities of the primary pigments (or monochromatic spectral lights) that are mixed. Interestingly, a color-space topology and its dimensionality may be characterizable independently of measurements of quantities of primary pigments. Points in the space (perfect monochromata) are characterizable as above, and neighborhoodscan be characterized in terms of a kind of continuous color variation that can be ascertained by direct visual inspection, which is itself dependent on continuous spatial variation. 29 This was pointed out to me by Paul Teller. Of course Relativity requires us to modify this, either to temporally locate all events in any inertial frame, or else to locate them in an over-arching 'space-time'. But we will leave these matters aside here. 30 It is the lack of constraints and means of producing possible biological species, physical ailments, personality types, and other natural kinds that sets them apart from the physical abstractions that we are concerned with here. This is associated with the fact that there are no uninstantiated 'empty spaces' in the 'species space', analogous to places in physical space that have nothing in them. 31 Perhaps there are no perfectly color-fast things that always ~stay in step' in color, but we are now able to use wave-lengths of light produced by heated substances for this purpose. 32 In a general discussion of measurement (Adams, 1966) I have argued that both classical and modern theories of magnitude or 'quantity' that omit the temporal dimension should be regarded as theories of ideal standards which are unchanging in relation to one another. The Appendix to this paper shows that under normal circumstances determining constancy and change by comparing objects with such standards is justified by practical 'informational' considerations. We 'measure' colors, weights or what-have-you by comparing them with standards at different times, but we use the information thus gained to estimate how the things measured will 'fit together' at one time. It is more difficult to argue, but I would also suggest that the assurance of fitting together is why it is desirable to obtain the interpersonal agreement which can be gained when observers compare things with known standards. 33 That most of the earth's surface is solid is what makes it capable of supporting such "features; that is what distinguishes the solid from the fluid.

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34 It might also be argued that we have theoretical grounds for holding, say, that the wavelengths of light emitted by certain things are constant, and that certain molecular lattices always have the same dimensions, and this provides the ultimate justification for determining color and length constancy by reference to these theoretical constants. There can be no doubt that we do use theory in the development of ever more refined standards, but I would argue that the ultimate 'proof' of this procedure is the actual relative constancy of the improved standards. 35 We might be inclined to say science evolves more and more refined concepts of weight, color, and so on when it evolves more refined standards and methods of measuring weight, length, color, etc. There is something to this, but it is significant that while standards and methods of measurement change there is seldom a change in theory, and theoretical change is what we commonly associate with conceptual change. For instance, though increasingly 'exact' ways of measuring lengths and times were evolved in classical physics, Einstein's theoretical revolution is what we regard as changing our concepts of length and time. 36 Of course Relativistic and Quantum Mechanical developments call for more radical alterations in this scheme of things. For instance, when we are careful we do not speak of the length of such and such a thing, but rather of the thing's length relative to a particular frame of reference, so the classical dimensional ontology becomes relativized while a new non-relativized concept is added: namely that of 'spatio-temporal distance'. My vague impression is that the returns are not in yet as far as concerns 'quantized quantities', with only vaguely formulated 'correspondence principles' connecting quantum phenomena with their 'classical counterparts'. 37 Cf. Quine (1960, sections 50 and 52). I will not consider here the still more radical nominalist program of Hartry Field (1980), which seeks to dispense with all abstraction. For the present at least it does not seem that Field's system has been put to use by working scientists. A program that is in some ways akin to Quine's is that originated by McKinsey, Sugar and Suppes (1953) of representing scientific theories as set-theoretical predicates (cf. also Sneed, 1971, as well as the more recent variation of van Fraassen, 1980). 38 It would be anachronistic to regard pure numbers as prior to denominate ones, since the pure number representation was only arrived at via a tortuous evolution. Euclid's own arithmetic, set forth in Book VII of The Elements, represents numbers by lengths, and multiplication was justified by appeal to the theory of proportionals, and Galileo also represented numbers by lines (cf. the Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, especially the First Day). The pure number continuum was only consistently and carefully developed through the work of Dedekind and others in the latter part of the 19th century. 39 Chihara's recent work on constructability and existence (Chihara, 1984, 1990) confines itself to the constructable without an abstract that transcends it. If this approach succeeds in the foundations of mathematics it may point the direction for future work on physical abstraction.

REFERENCES Adams, E. W.: 1966, 'On the Nature and Purpose of Measurement', Synthese 16, 125169.

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Adams, E. W.: 1974, 'On the Naive Conception of the Topology of the Surface of a Body', in P. Suppes (ed.), Space, Time and Geometry, D. Reidel, Dordrecht, pp. 402424. Adams, E. W.: 1984, 'On the Superficial', Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 65, 386-407. Adams, E. W.: 1986, 'On the Dimensionality of Surfaces, Solids, and Spaces', Erkenntnis 24, 137-201. Aristotle: 1991, The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by R. McKeon, Random House, New York. Chihara, C. S.: 1984, 'A Simple Theory of Types Without Platonic Domains', Journal of Philosophical Logic 13, 249-283. Chihara, C. S.: 1990, Constructibility and Mathematical Existence, Oxford University Press. Claggett, M.: 1968, Nicole Oresme and the Geometry of Qualities and Motions, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin. Field, H.: 1980, Science Without Numbers, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. Frege, G.: 1884, Foundations of Arithmetic, translation by J. L. Austin, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Galileo: 1638, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, translation by H. Crew and A. de Salvio, Dover Publications, New York. Heath, T.: 1956, The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements, Dover Publications, New York. Helmholtz, H. v.: 1887, 'Numbering and Measuring from an Epistemological Viewpoint', translation by M. F. Lowe, in R. S. Cohen and Y. Elkana, Hermann yon Helrnholtz. Epistemological Writings, D. Reidel, Dordrecht, pp. 72-114. Hilbert, D.: 1902, Foundations of Geometry, translation by E. J. Townsend, Open Court, La Salle, Illinois. Kant, I.: 1787, Critique of Pure Reason, translation by Norman Kemp Smith, St Martin's Press, New York. Kelley, J. L.: 1955, General Topology, Springer-Verlag, New York. Krantz, D., Luce, R. D., Suppes, P. and Tversky, A.: 1970, Foundations of Measurement, Vol. I, Academic Press, New York. Maxwell, J. C,: 1877, Matter and Motion, Dover Publications, New York. McKinsey, J. J. C., Sugar, A. C. and Suppes, P.: 1953, 'Axiomatic Foundations of Classical Particle Mechanics', Journal of Rational Mechanics and Analysis Vol. 2 pp. 253-272. Moody, E. and Claggett, M.: 1952, The Medieval Science of Weights, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin. Newton, Sir Isaac: 1725, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Motte translation revised by F. Cajori, University of California Press, Berkeley, California. Quine, W. v. O.: 1960, Word and Object, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Russell, B.: 1905, 'On Denoting', Mind XIV, 479-493. Sneed, J.: 1971, The Logical Structure of Mathematical Physics, Humanities Press, New York. van Fraassen, B.: 1980 The Scientific Image, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Weyl, H.: 1949, Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.

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Whitehead, A. N.: 1919, The Principles of Natural Knowledge, Cambridge University Press. Manuscript submitted September 27, 1991 Department of Philosophy University of California Berkeley, CA 904720 USA