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
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. A concept might also be called a group, category, class,classification, type or kind.
So any of the names I gave this Auriga Leader is a potential concept.
The following sentences would all be valid:
- Auriga Leader is a ship
- Auriga Leader is a roro-ship
- Auriga Leader is a vehicle carrier
- Auriga Leader is a thing
- Auriga Leader is a vessel
So the statement "is a" about a thing links it to some concept that has a name. Later we will see that the three parts of an "is a" sentence
- Auriga Leader
- is a
- vehicle carrier
are just a good example for the structure of statements about things and concepts that are easily understandable by humans and computers.
The most precise way to clearly define a concept is to list all things that can be truely 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. The issue with this approach is just that different people have different notions about what the truth is. So saying "is a" is not quite precise - it would be more polite to say "I believe this is a" or "I would classify this as a".
An example would be "Auriga Leader is a solar powered ship". Given that only 0.05% of the ship's propulsion power and 1% of it's electrical usage was powered by solare energy I personally would not subscribe to this point of view. I'd personally probably say something like "Auriga Leader is a commercial solar power experimental vessel".
Concept are like bags or drawers in which you put things. Mostly it is already helpful to name a few things that you can put in the bag.
Example for a concept
"Vehicle carrier" is a concept.
- Auriga Leader is a vehicle carrier
- Salome is another vehicle carrier (which happens to have transported BITPlan's electric Vehicle in early 2017
- Glovis Corona is a vehicle carrier (which got famous for developing a list of 15 degrees in storm in December 2016