While considering how to create formal models of various conceptual domains, I have begun to consider that it will be much easier, at least in the beginning, to choose certain metaphysical categories as primitives. The ones I have encountered as hard-to-avoid so far include:
- time
- things (objects): classes, vs. instances
- attributes (or properties)
- states
There may be others which I can’t remember right now.
I would like to link this observation to the broader web of ideas.
Is there a theory of metaphysics which considers the above, or a somewhat similar list, as some very essential structuring principles of “a world”?
I feel like there is a lot to be said philosophically about why the above may be so indispensable.
For example: we usually have logic introduced to us as a refined theory of meaning, semantics, or truth. But when I tried to describe some systems with it, I realized that time was so much more of a necessary parameter in most real-world assertions than I expected. It opens the question, why should “logical truths” be a-temporal, yet the majority of truths we wish to say about the world are necessarily temporal?
And similarly, why does it seem so unavoidable to have both classes of objects, and instances of objects?
And why does it seem so indispensable to differentiate between attributes of things, vs. states?
To just give one example of what an explanation could look like, we could say that it seems fitting to embed time as nothing more than an index or ordered sequence in a logical system, in the same way that natural numbers are one of the first things we can define in a set theory.
Then perhaps we can define “events” as propositions which have a “time” argument. “Billy is red” turns into “Billy is red at time t”.
As for classes versus instances, we can say that instances are more primary. The world is a totality of objects, or referents. The abstract notion of “the collection of all things with certain properties” is equivalent to the idea of a “class”, but it allows us to reject the “top-down” idea that there are “Platonic forms” of a chair which get instantiated.
And maybe, we can also differentiate attributes vs. states with regards to time: that once the existence of an object is established, we can form atemporal propositions about that object, if they genuinely are time-independent. Otherwise, a time-dependent attribute is just a state.
Maybe, just maybe, it could all be reduced to “two layers”:
Default | Indexed
—————————————————
class | object
proposition| event
attribute | state
We could also add the difference between logical axioms of the world, vs. “physical laws”, which are just time-dependent axioms:
Default | Indexed
—————————————————
axiom | time-dependent law
For example, “not not x entails x” is a logical law. But a law of physics could be, “property P is inversely correlated with time”.
Does this sound like any particular approach by any philosopher?
