Proselint

Some philosophers, thinking especially of Graham Harman, have started reacting against the now sort of commonplace idea that "there are no things (or objects) in reality."

From a common sense perspective, it's obvious that there are things. Sure, you can point out the flux and decay of all entities, but still, this table here is a coherent thing even if it's made from parts in a temporary arrangement.

In some sense, philosophy itself is destroyed when you go down the path of denying objects, since philosophy crucially deals with concepts, and concepts are "thought objects."

Harman describes two modes of denying objects: undermining and overmining. Undermining is the tendency to say "really, this object is just a composition of these other particles," while overmining is the tendency to say "this object is just a modulation in a grand monistic entity."

Instead of that, he recommends an ontology of objects that's pretty interesting and fun to read about. He would, I think, agree that objects are unique in that they are (in programmer jargon) "pointer equal" to only themselves... and each real object, for that reason, has an infinity of potential that's never exhausted by any "arbitrary" perception of it... yet still, we perceive other objects not directly, but through aesthetic caricatures, and on that level you might have different degrees of uniqueness.

Math has long tradition of generalizing definitions to make sense for larger domains, when it's useful. See fractional powers, complex numbers, quaternions, and many more.

I can imagine defining uniqueness as a function returning real number from instead of a boolean value. For example:

    let U(p, x, X) be the uniqueness of property(function) p(x) for element x of set X 

    U(p, x, X) = 1.0 - (size of X')/(size of X\{x}), where
    X' = set of all elements x' of X such that p(x')=p(x) and x' != x

Property p of element x of set X is strictly unique when, and only when U(p, x, X) = 1

When it's useful? For example for speaking about minimizing collisions of hashes for given data.

Another way of thinking about it: uniqueness is 1-probability of uniformly randomly finding element with same value of p in X as x after removing x from X.

See also write-good: https://github.com/btford/write-good

Thanks for the feedback. These are issues we've thought about, and we came to different conclusions:

re 2, you'll see at http://proselint.com/approach/ that one of the guiding principles of Proselint is that we defer to experts. In practice, that's meant almost all the advice comes from Bryan Garner's usage guide, Garner's Modern American Usage. He is a careful compiler of advice and you'll find that he is almost never "totally wrong", and when his advice is debated, he knows it, notes it, and provides a thoughtful discussion.

re 1, we think of Proselint as eventually being useful as a training tool, a way to learn the conventions. Note that natural languages are large, with so many low-frequency terms that nobody can learn the whole language. Why err if an automated tool can help? Consider for example demonyms, what you call people from a certain place. How many people know, for example, that people from Manchester are Mancunians, not Manchesterians? Rather than call someone by the wrong name, with Proselint the voice of an expert gently corrects you, and you learn a cool new word.

We aren't a mob of programmers, we are three people who love language, respect it, and think we're 2% of the way to making a great tool, one that The New Yorker could run over its stories to flag issues that its own editors would flag anyways. (In fact, we've done this, running Proselint over a corpus of highly vetted text, and have found numerous issues.)

>I'm a writer and editor, and I dislike the idea of this tool quite a bit.

You dislike this tool the same way welders dislike computer welding or the same way truck drivers will dislike automated driving.

Everyone wants to believe their job is so complex that a computer will never be able to perform the same task adequately. Is critiquing a sentence really as complex as driving a car in heavy traffic? Or playing chess? Or finding faces in photographs? Or winning on Jeopardy?