Re: Hypostatic And Prescisive Abstraction

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HAPA.  Discussion Note 1

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Referring to a few of Peirce's standard discussions of "hypostatic abstraction" (HA),
the main thing about HA is that it turns an adjective or some part of a predicate
into an extra subject, upping the arity of the main predicate in the process.

For example, a typical case of HA occurs in the transformation
from "honey is sweet" to "honey possesses sweetness", which we
could choose to represent in several different ways as follows:

Sweet(honey) ~~~> Possesses(honey, sweetness)

S(h) ~~~> P(h, s)

 S          P
 o          o
 |   ~~~>   |
 o          o
 h        <h,s>

            ^
[S]  ~~~>  /P\
 |        o->-o
 |        |   |   
 o        o   o
 h        h   s

The chief thing about this form of grammatical transformation is that we
abstract the adjective "sweet" from the main predicate, thus arriving at
a new, increased-arity predicate "possesses", and as a by-product of the
reaction, as it were, precipitating out the substantive "sweetness" as a
new subject of the new predicate.

Jon Awbrey

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