RE: [humanmarkup-comment] Base Schema-community

[Rex Brooks <rexb@starbourne.com>]

Actually, I'm thinking in sets, both overlapping and enveloping, that 
is subsets, supersets, and intersecting sets. I don't have a 
structure yet. I'm hoping that as we explore this element, some 
structure or structures will emerge. I also think that what is 
occurring to me is the beginning of an approach to the concept of 
perception. It has always been the big missing piece for me. If you 
look back at the class structure I did, for example. I included as 
much of the established concepts, such as personality type models, as 
I thought seemed safe, but I did not include cognition or perception 
models. I may be getting closer to a comfort zone for that, but I'm 
not there yet.

I agree that the familial relationship is less consenting while 
children remain in their minority, though it would apply after that, 
and even before, psychologically if not legally. I'm not sure about 
consent as an attribute at the base level. I'd like to hear from the 
others. What I am thinking is: group - any collection of one or more 
humans with or without consent, and group is the atomic level of 
community. How it orders itself in ascending levels of abstraction is 
not clear to me yet, but this seems necessary to me as the basis for 
building up a picture of where group/community belief structures 
define however much of any given individual member's perceptions or 
predisposition toward taking the group/community belief structure as 
their own perceptions.

Thoughts?

Ciao,
Rex



At 2:51 PM -0500 7/29/02, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>I agree.  The current model is not abstract enough.  
>
>Where the issue is is the properties by which we
>can say they are a group, and
>I believe "community" implies consent to share, be
>it property, definitions, workspace, etc.  That would
>be problematic for a family unit because a familial
>relationship would have both consent (marriage, divorce, etc.)
>and lack of it (children don't choose parents).
>
>So are you proposing an abstract class : group?
>Is that the term that best describes it? 
>
>A culture is not a group.  A group can have properties the
>aggregation of which might be a culture.
>
>len
>
>
>From: Rex Brooks [mailto:rexb@starbourne.com]
>
>As I said, I am getting back to the Primary Base Schema discussions
>again. Let me preface this by saying that I do not think that we have
>exhausted the previous elements we have discussed, and, in fact, we
>have not as yet settled on final entries for these elements, but I
>want to continue on because we have enough discussion under each for
>me to retrieve and summarize later, when I do call for finalizing
>definitions.
>
>I especially want to make sure that you don't think that I believe we
>have finished with chronemic in particular because it was the element
>which launched us into the semiotic experiment, which I also want you
>join the discussions for exploring the signs concept as Len and
>Sylvia have introduced it thus far.
>
>Now, having said all that, let's consider our next element:
>
>community
>
>This is a ComplexType without the attribute of abstract, which means
>that it can be used in and of itself rather than requiring a
>derivation.
>
>This element is especially important because, while artifact strongly
>implies a culture for the creation of something which can be a trace
>of human activity; name (which I include because it  has a candidate
>specification to which we will needs adhere) and address pertain to
>localizing an individual; bodyLocation identifies sites on the Human
>Body; channel identifies the sensory inputs that can be assigned to
>the Human as we evolve the concept; and chronemic introduces temporal
>context; community gives us an element upon which we can begin to
>develop context because all humans, even the autisitc, exist in
>relation to the overall human community.
>
>One could argue with that of course, citing the well-known tree
>falling the woods, and also citing evidence of humans verifiably
>raised without human contact--yet we can only conceive of these
>arguments and have experience of the wild children through reports
>from our human community because we have some kind of a priori
>knowledge or experience of human community and context. And, that,
>dear friends is good enough for me and all I will have to say about
>it for now.
>
>What I want to do is consider what Len has in the straw man schema.
>He description begins with: Abstract Human Organization, and I am
>going to take exception to that because I think it is too abstract. I
>think that the element community needs to start lower down the levels
>of abstraction from that. I think it begins with group, and starts
>with two or more human individuals.
>
>I understand the overall purpose of postulating the abstraction of
>organization, shared activities, etc, and I agree that it is
>operationally more useful at that level for most purposes. However, I
>think that if we start with the concept of group, we can build a more
>fundamentally grounded description, and so I would argue that this
>needs to be an abstract type and needs to be derived for
>particularization. The basic unit is the group and differentiates
>from there so that the next level of abstraction whatever it is must
>begin distinguishing identifying characteristics of the community in
>question, from familial to kin relationships to age groups, to status
>groups, etc, etc.
>
>I am, of course, willing to be persuaded differently. That is, after
>all, what discussion is for.
>
>I agree that one typifiction of communities is shared activities,
>communications, rating artifacts, sharing worship, business, sports,
>etc. However I think those distinctions are at a higher social and
>cultural level than I want to begin with for community.
>
>Let me say a couple of things here, which relate to the semiotic
>discussions, too. For the purposes of establishing context as it
>forms however large a part of an individual's perception or
>cognition, and sense of self that it does, we need to start at as
>fundamental a level of abstraction as we can, and build up as
>discretely as possible, the overlapping set of influences of
>communities in helping form perception, especially in terms of
>cultural communities.
>
>So, if this doesn't get some discussion going, I may just resort
>to... well, maybe not. However, I do hope to see a bit more
>participation. I wish I could just outright declare vacation season
>over, but I will do my best to stimulate you to participate.


-- 
Rex Brooks
Starbourne Communications Design
1361-A Addison, Berkeley, CA 94702 *510-849-2309
http://www.starbourne.com * rexb@starbourne.com