 | This article includes a list ofgeneral references, butit lacks sufficient correspondinginline citations. Please help toimprove this article byintroducing more precise citations.(June 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Hypostatic abstraction inphilosophy andmathematical logic, also known ashypostasis orsubjectal abstraction, is aformal operation that transforms apredicate into arelation; for example "Honeyis sweet" is transformed into "Honeyhas sweetness". The relation is created between the original subject and a new term that represents theproperty expressed by the original predicate.
Hypostasis changes apropositional formula of the formX is Y to another one of the formX has the property of being Y orX has Y-ness. The logical functioning of the second objectY-ness consists solely in the truth-values of those propositions that have the corresponding abstract propertyY as the predicate. The object of thought introduced in this way may be called ahypostatic object and in some senses anabstract object and aformal object.
The above definition is adapted from the one given byCharles Sanders Peirce.[1] As Peirce describes it, the main point about the formal operation of hypostatic abstraction, insofar as it operates on formal linguistic expressions, is that it converts apredicative adjective or predicate into an extra subject, thus increasing by one the number of "subject" slots—called thearity oradicity—of the main predicate.
The distinction between particular objects and aformal object is noted byAnthony Kenny:[2] we might identify any object as having a certain property to which we respond, but the formal object of that response is the property which we implicitly ascribe to the particular object by virtue of us having that response: thus if a certain red rose is "lovely", the rose has the property of loveliness, and this loveliness is the formal object of ouraesthetic appreciation of the rose.[3]
The grammatical trace of this hypostatic transformation is a process that extracts the adjective "sweet" from the predicate "is sweet", replacing it by a new, increased-arity predicate "possesses", and as a by-product of the reaction, as it were, precipitating out the substantive "sweetness" as a second subject of the new predicate.
The abstraction of hypostasis takes the concrete physical sense of "taste" found in "honey is sweet" and ascribes to it the formalmetaphysical characteristics in "honey has sweetness".
