Where does the abstract word come from?: Philosophy Forums

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Where does the abstract word come from?

Where does the abstract word come from?

Beckett
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Posted 03/26/07 - 06:27 AM: Subject: Where does the abstract word come from?	#1
If people invent words to explain something, there must be a specific meaning in mind when a word is invented. So where then do abstract words like "good," "evil," "justice," and "happiness" come from? The people who invented these words must've intended them to mean more than gibberish. That is, after all, the whole point in inventing a word. So now for the big question: Are abstract words like beauty and love, actually the remnance of extinct technical terms? Like a caveman invented a word to mean "grass" and over mellenia the word was manipulated through cultural use and translation to mean "worldly," or something.

teleplasm
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Posted 03/26/07 - 12:43 PM:	#2
The answer is contained in the very title of your thread: they are abstracted from concrete words. In Scholastic terms, they are words for second intentions. Reality gives rise to a concept (first intention); this concept then gives rise to a further concept (second intention). Accordingly, it is a fallacy to treat a second intention as representing an underlying reality.

aegger
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Posted 03/27/07 - 11:54 PM:	#3
I really like what Teleplasm said. It is true that we simplify an idea to a word that can encompass the idea. It is people that question the depth of the word that tend to question the overall meaning. The original definition is just an attempt to give others the general idea. Leave it to philosophers to argue the intracacies of meaning and usage.

stephendonnelly
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Posted 03/28/07 - 02:28 PM:	#4
Beckett wrote: If people invent words to explain something, there must be a specific meaning in mind when a word is invented. So where then do abstract words like "good," "evil," "justice," and "happiness" come from? The people who invented these words must've intended them to mean more than gibberish. That is, after all, the whole point in inventing a word. So now for the big question: Are abstract words like beauty and love, actually the remnance of extinct technical terms? Like a caveman invented a word to mean "grass" and over mellenia the word was manipulated through cultural use and translation to mean "worldly," or something. My guess is that something similar to the following explains where abstract words came from: After having established enough technical words to make every-day communication with other humans appear seamless and easy, our ancestors began combining the meaning of many different words whose connotative meanings were relatively similar into one or two individual abstract words. For example: A farmer works on his farm everyday from dawn until dusk. Each night, he comes home tired and dirty from his difficult labour. Eventually, either he, or his descendents begin to associate "hard work" and "difficulty" (both of which causes a person to feel worn-out and tired at the end of each day) with the overarching word of, "Exhaustion". It seems necessary, however, that people living well before his time had already established the word "bad", or even "pain". Up until the basic descriptive words of "bad" and "good" were developed, man must have been an incredibly limited creature, since these words are capable of summing-up all of the different types feelings that humans experience. Just my two cents on the matter. ~ Stephen K. Donnelly
Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries. (Tractatus Logico Philosophicus; Wittgenstein)

teleplasm
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Posted 03/28/07 - 03:21 PM:	#5
It is quite hard to imagine primitive man saying "Work exhausting, food delicious" long before he began to say "Work bad, food good". "Good" and "bad" probably did not arise from abstraction but from grunts of approval and disapproval respectively.

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