[humanmarkup] Base Schema-community

[Rex Brooks <rexb@starbourne.com>]

Hi Everyone,

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.

Ciao,
Rex

P.S. Needless to say, please reply to this with your thoughts on 
community, so we can keep the thread together.
-- 
Rex Brooks
Starbourne Communications Design
1361-A Addison, Berkeley, CA 94702 *510-849-2309
http://www.starbourne.com * rexb@starbourne.com