When Derk Bodde translated Feng Youlan's history of Chinese philosophy
(1952), he noted the difficulties of construing the White Horse paradox
in English.
Strictly speaking, names or terms are divided into those that are
abstract and those that are concrete. The abstract term denotes the
universal, the concrete term the particular. The particular is the
denotation, and the universal the connotation, of the term. In western
inflected languages there is no difficulty in distinguishing between the
particular ('white' or 'horse') and the abstract ('whiteness' or
'horseness'). In Chinese, however, owing to the fact that the written
characters are ideographic and pictorial and lack all inflection, there
is no possible way, as far as the form of individual words is concerned,
of distinguishing between abstract and concrete terms. Thus in Chinese
the word designating a particular horse and that designating the
universal, 'horseness,' are written and pronounced in the same way.
Similarly with other terms, so that such words as 'horse' and 'white',
being used to designate both the concrete particular and the abstract
universal, thus hold two values. (1952:206)
The original "abstract"/"concrete" distinction was a distinction among
words or terms. Traditional grammar distinguishes the abstract noun
"whiteness" from the concrete noun "white" without implying that this
linguistic contrast corresponds to a metaphysical distinction in what
they stand for. In the 17th century this grammatical distinction was
transposed to the domain of ideas. Locke speaks of the general idea of a
triangle which is "neither Oblique nor Rectangle, neither Equilateral,
Equicrural nor Scalenon; but all and none of these at once," remarking
that even this idea is not among the most "abstract, comprehensive and
difficult" (Essay IV.vii.9). Locke's conception of an abstract idea as
one that is formed from concrete ideas by the omission of distinguishing
detail was immediately rejected by Berkeley and then by Hume. But even
for Locke there was no suggestion that the distinction between abstract
ideas and concrete or particular ideas corresponds to a distinction
among objects. "It is plain, ..." Locke writes, "that General and
Universal, belong not to the real existence of things; but are
Inventions and Creatures of the Understanding, made by it for its own
use, and concern only signs, whether Words or Ideas"
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abstract-objects/
Peirce's definition of a sign defines it in relation to its object and
its interpretant sign, and thus it defines signhood in relative terms,
by means of a predicate with three places. In this definition, signhood
is a role in a triadic relation, a role that a thing bears or plays in a
given context of relationships - it is not as an absolute, non-relative
property of a thing-in-itself, one that it possesses independently of
all relationships to other things.
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