31. Never Instantiate an Abstract Cass

This web page is associated with a book called called Reverse Engineering the Universe.

The book can be bought at: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Dr_Jerome_Heath_Reverse_Engineering_the_Universe?id=_OvqBQAAQBAJ

The book gives a more complete explanation of these issues and includes a number of related topic discussions. The combination develops the understanding of these concepts from a number of viewpoints.

Just how abstract do you want to be?

Abstraction as an Abstraction

Kant and Critique of Pure Reason:

Everyone has a problem with Kant's book. The problems started when it was first published. In my reading, Kant trashed almost every philosophy and demonstrated that it would be easy to trash any other philosophy. The philosophical community was devastated and, of course, angry. The methodology was correct structured method and thus put structured methodology into question. The intelligentsia of the time felt that they did not want to question structured methodology as they were just then in the process of constructing it.

Kant answered by expressing the fact that the problem was different assumptions that caused contradictions to arise. To counter this, according to Kant, we needed a transcendental. Somehow the transcendental would resolve the contradictions. As I see it, this is not the problem. The problem is with structuralist methodology. The problem is instantiating an abstract classes. The whole process involves defining abstracts, generalities, aggregates to develop the 'structure'. But to use these aggregates in a philosophical process they need to be analyzed into true and false categories. But abstracts, generalities, and aggregates cannot be resolved into true and false. True and false can only be assigned to real specifics. An item can be true or false but a generality that represents the combination of many items cannot be true or false since it represents many items and each may or may not be true or false - and very likely all the items of a generality cannot be the same truthfulness as they are separate items in reality. In particular, the transcendental itself needs to be more abstract than any other abstract class - in order to be the transcendental (the shadow?).

The problem with instantiating an abstract class in programming is exactly that problem. An abstract class represents an abstraction of real items for the sake of making programming easier. But the abstraction cannot represent a real specific item when instantiated. So using such an instantiated abstract object in a program yields meaningless results since such an instantiated object itself has no meaning. Abstract classes are used for categorizing (extending) not instantiating.

Jerome Heath