Specification and user’s guide corresponding author: Barry Smith
Download 0.98 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Mutual dependence among qualities and their parts
Processes as dependent entitiesProcesses themselves stand to the independent continuants which are their participants as qualities stand to the independent continuants which are their bearers. Our strategy is to use the instantiation relation between process instances and process universals as basis for an account of how process attributions (veridical process attribution talk) relate to the underlying reality. To make an approach along these lines work, however, we will need to find a way to do justice to the fact that the processes with which experimenters have to deal are typically highly complex in nature. A running process, for example, might simultaneously make true assertions to the effect that it is not merely an instance of determinable universals such as: running process constant speed running process cardiovascular exercise process air-displacement process compression sock testing process but also of quantitatively determinate universals such as running process of 30 minute duration 3.12 m/s motion process 9.2 calories per minute energy burning process 30.12 liters per kilometer oxygen utilizing process and so on. That processes involve change is then reflected in the fact that some of the universals on this list may hold non-rigidly; thus John’s process of running may be a 9.2 calories per minute energy burning process at one time and an 8.7 calories per minute energy burning process at another. An Amended Proposal illustrates the cardiac events occurring in the left ventricle in a single beating of a human heart. This figure tells us that each successive beating of the heart is such as to involve (at least) six different sorts of physiological processes, corresponding to measurements along the six distinct dimensions of aortic pressure, atrial pressure, ventricular pressure, ventricular volume, electrical activity, and voltage, respectively. (Here voltage is used as a proxy for the intensity of sound.) (As de Bono, et al., point out, these measurements reflect the variables encoded in models of human physiology created by scientists using of ordinary differential equations [57].) 
Figure 10. A Wiggers diagram, showing the cardiac events occurring in the left ventricle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiac_cycle. The figure illustrates how, when measuring activity in a complex system such as a human organism, it is variations only along specific structural dimensions of the corresponding whole process to which our measuring processes and the resultant measurement data relate. In the running case, these different measuring processes are directed to structural dimensions within the whole process pertaining to speed of motion, energy consumed, oxygen utilized, and so forth. In each case we focus on some one structural dimension and ignore, or strip away in a process of selective abstraction, all other dimensions within the whole process. When measuring processes selective abstraction yields in the simplest possible case representations of sequences of qualities. Such sequences of qualities are one simple example of what, in what follows, we shall call process profiles. When we measure, for example, the process of temperature increase in patient John, then John himself is the bearer of the temperature qualities that we measure and record on John’s temperature chart. And when we measure John’s growth process by taking measurements of his height and weight at regular intervals, then there, too, it is John who is the bearer of the qualities that we measure and record. Process profiles of this simple sort can be represented by means of a graph in which measures of a certain quality are plotted against time. Mutual dependence among qualities and their partsWhen we measure continuants, too, there is a similar process of selective abstraction, which yields – again in the simplest possible case – representations of qualities (of height, mass, and so on). In the realm of colour qualities we can distinguish three dimensions of variation, corresponding to three reciprocally s-dependent parts of hue, brightness and saturation which can be measured independently. An instance of colour‑hue cannot of its nature exist, except as bound up with some instance of brightness and saturation; instances of brightness and saturation, similarly, cannot exist except as bound up with some specific instance of colour hue [17]. This yields a dependence structure of the sort depicted in Figure 11. [, ]  Figure 11: Three-sided mutual dependence of the three instance-level parts (a, b, c) of a colour instance: hue (), brightness () and saturation (). The parts represented in this Figure can be, again, separated out by the observer through a process of selective attention – as when we measure the saturation of a colour sample and ignore its hue and brightness – but they cannot exist except in the context of some whole of the given sort.
Download 0.98 Mb. Share with your friends:
|