Meta
No fear of Meta
When you start talking "Meta" you might end up very lonely. Meta denotes an abstraction level that seems to be so far away from reality that quite a few people simply do not bother. Basically there are three abstraction level on which you can deal with things:
- The thing level
- [The concept level #The_concept_level]
- The meta level
The thing level
A thing (also called object, entity, instance, item, element) is something, anything. If you can point at it or talk about it or call it "it" then it is probably a thing.
There is a thing called "concept" and that makes Meta interesting. Talking about a thing needs to clarify Whatchamacallit?
Example for a thing
What is it it?
The picture shows the Auriga Leader. The wikipedia article has some statements about this thing. Auriga Leader WikiData Item Q2871898 makes some of the statements available in computer readable form.
Whatchamacallit?
- I call it a ship.
- I also call it a roro-ship.
- I also call it a Vehicle carrier
- I also call it a thing.
- I also call it a vessel.
The concept level
The concept level tries to give similar things a name to group these things. So any of the names I gave this Auriga Leader is a potential concept. The most precise way to clearly define a concept is to list all things that can be given the name of the concept. For quite a few concepts that is possible. And given todays world wide access to internet-information it gets even more feasible.
Example for a concept
"Vehicle carrier" is a concept.