Philosphers Toolkit

In the handy Philosopher's Toolkit book[1], there is a section[2] explaining the difference between "categorical" statements and "modal" statements. In reading it, I see that some of my intuitions about the assumptions implicit in the object oriented programming model (e.g. "what time period was this data true?", "says who?", etc) were actually a recognition that OO models contain "categorical" assertions and do not (without explicit programming) support "modalities". Temporal modality, intensional logics, etc. E.G. there is no "date range" associated with each attributes value.

In another section[3], Leibniz's law of identity (which says that A is the same "thing" as B if all attributes of A are equal to their corresponding attributes in B), relates to my epiphany #5. But which set of properties are necessary/sufficient to claim a match? It depends on the ontology. Consider "cross temporal identity"...the river of today vs the river of yesterday..."molecules" vs "water". For people, the properties are often not used to identify them, but instead a "continuity of memory" connects yesterday's YOU vs today's YOU.

In another section[4], the difference between "types" and "tokens" are discussed. Type is an analog of "class". Token is an analog of "object". Type-identical is an analog of "instanceOf". Token-identical is an analog of "address-of(A) == address-of(B)".

[1] The Philosopher's Toolkit, Julian Baggini and Peter S. Fosl, Blackwell Publishers, 1st Ed., 2003, ISBN: 0631228748
[2] ibid, section 4.4
[3] ibid, section 3.6
[4] ibid, section 4.17