Alfred North Whitehead

".. just as we cannot perceive a ... point that has position but no magnitude, or a line that has length but no breadth, it is impossible, says Whitehead, to conceive of a simple spatial or temporal location. To think that we can do so involves what he called "The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness," the error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete."

Source : http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whitehead/

Comment Whether one "cannot perceive" such a "thing" as a point that has position but no magnitude I am not sure ; and I would make sure exact statements by Whitehead are found by some University Professors who can read (if any such).

How can it be "impossible" to conceive a simple spatial or temporal location ? Where did you put you hat, the reader ? (I am not now asking any 'philosopher' who would tell me they do not wear hats ; this being only an example). Or, say, where did you park your car ?

This has to do with getting away with the 'absolute' space and 'absolute' time ; but the article I found on-line is entirely unclear. Were the people who wrote it just dumb on the subject ?

Please note that the FALLACY OF MISPLACED CONCRETNESS can be seen in every other word in every newspapers one finds (at least in Los Angeles ; I do not know about other places).

This fallacy can be found in EVERY word of some of the 'philosophical' treatises, especially after circa 1946-47 in the USA; more so after 1950. This has infested "medicine" (confer the criminal graft within psychiatry especially from about 1946 and on in the USA).

This issue is nothing new ; it had been noticed by John Locke ; it had been given most excellent treatment by Jeremy Bentham ; it had been very early 1920's taken up by Count Korzybski ; who called it objectification (of high-order abstractions) which seems a very apt term for the sorts of fallacy.

There is no such "thing" anywhere in the world as a 'circle', or a 'sphere', or a thickless 'length' other than as one's idea — or a word ; useful if understood ; (potentially extremely) harmful when misunderstood.

EXAMPLE, invented (by me) of the most common fallacy : can you, the reader, lose your mind and then find it lying somewhere under the table ? No ; the statement makes no sense ; the term 'mind' in it has been objectified.

How many psychiatrists nowadays do understand this one issue ? Not many, the reader. This is plainly evident in very nearly all of the literature published nowadays on such subject-matters.

You have been warned, the reader, about 'philosophers' : where some genuine thinkers such as A.N. Whitehead had become targete to any sorts of writing mediocrity many of them actually criminal.

(Please note that nobody would do some things of the 'literary' sort frequently seen for no pay, the reader ; should there by any new holocausts, blame the lying writers ; blame the university professors who had not seen, blame some puny-scheme experts who would destroy anything and everything for the sake of some "Judas shekel" ; do not blame me for pointing this out ; for this would be only done by the sorts enumerated in the preceding statements.). (WPT)

From An Introduction to Mathematics, 1939 by Alfred North Whitehead

Throughout the middle ages, under the influence of Aristotle, the science was entirely misconceived.   (Etc.)   The vital point in the application of mathematical formulæ is to have clear ideas and a correct estimate of their relevance to the phenomena under observation. No less than ourselves, our remote ancestors were impressed with the importance of natural phenomena and with the desirability of taking energetic measures to regulate the sequence of events. Under the influence of irrelevant ideas they executed elaborate religious ceremonies to aid the birth of the new moon, and performed sacrifices to save the sun during the crisis of an eclipse. There is no reason to believe that they were more stupid than we are. But at that epoch there had not been opportunity for the slow accumulation of clear and relevant ideas.

The sort of way in which physical sciences grow into a form capable of treatment by mathematical methods is illustrated by the history of the gradual growth of the science of electromagnetism. Thunderstorms are events on a grand scale, arousing terror in men and even animals. From the earliest times they must have been objects of wild and fantastic hypotheses, though it may be doubted whether our modern scientific discoveries in connection with electricity are not more astonishing than any of the magical explanations of savages. The Greeks knew that amber (Greek, electron) when rubbed would attract light and dry bodies. In 1600 A. D. Dr. Gilbert, of Colchester, published the first work on the subject in which any scientific method is followed. He made a list of substances possessing properties similar to those of amber ; he must also have the credit of connecting, however vaguely, electric and magnetic phenomena. At the end of the seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth century knowledge advanced. Electrical machines were made, sparks were obtained from them; and the Leyden Jar was invented, by which these effects could be intensified. Some organized knowledge was being obtained ; but still o relevant mathematical ideas had been found out. Franklin, in the year 1752, sent a kite into the clouds and proved that thunderstorms were electrical.

Meanwhile from the earliest epoch (2634 B. C.) the Chinese had utilized the characteristic property of the compass needle, but do not seem to have connected it with any theoretical ideas. The really profound changes in human life all have their ultimate origin in knowledge pursued for its own sake. The use of the compass was not introduced into Europe till the end of the twelfth century A. D., more than 3000 years after its first use in China. The importance which the science of electromagnetism has since assumed in every department of human life is not due to the superior practical bias of Europeans, but to the fact that in the West electrical and magnetic phenomena were studied by men who were dominated by abstract theoretic interests.

The discovery of the electric current is due to two Italians, Galvani in 1780, and Volta in 1792. This great invention opened a new series of phenomena for investigation. The scientific world had now three separate, though allied, groups of occurrences on hand�the effects of "statical" electricity arising from frictional electrical machines, the magnetic phenomena, and the effects due to electric currents. From the end of the eighteenth century onwards, these thee lines of investigation were quickly inter-connected and the modern science of electromagnetism was constructed, which now threatens to transform human life.

Mathematical ideas now appear. During the decade 1780 to 1789, Coulomb, a Frenchman, proved that magnetic poles attract or repeal each other, in proportion to the inverse square of their distances, and also that the same law holds for electric charges�laws curiously analogous to that of gravitation. In 1820, Oersted, a Dane, discovered that electric currents exert a force on magnets, and almost immediately afterwards the mathematical law of the force was correctly formulated by Ampère, a Frenchman, who also proved that two electric currents exerted forces on each other. "The experimental investigation by which Ampère established the law of the mechanical action between electric currents is one of the most brilliant achievements in science. The whole, theory and experiment, seems as if it had leaped, full-grown and full armed, from the brain of the 'Newton of Electricity.' It is perfect in form, and unassailable in accuracy, and it is summed up in a formula from which all the phenomena may be deduced, and which must always remain the cardinal formula of electro-dynamics."*

* Electricity and Magnetism, Clerk Maxwell, Vol.. II., ch. iii.

The momentous laws of induction between currents and between currents and magnets were discovered by Michael Faraday in 1831-32. Faraday was asked : "What is the use of this discovery?" He answered : "What is the use of a child�it grows to be a man." Faraday's child has grown to be a man and is now the basis of all the modern applications of electricity. Faraday also reorganized the whole theoretical conception of the science. His ideas, which had not been fully understood by the scientific world, were extended and put into a directly mathematical form by Clerk Maxwell in 1873. As a result of his mathematical investigations, Maxwell recognized that, under certain conditions, electrical vibrations ought to be propagated. He at once suggested that the vibrations which form light are electrical. This suggestion has since been verified, so that now the whole theory of light is nothing but a branch of the great science of electricity. Also Herz, a German, in 1888, following on Maxwell's ideas, succeeded in reducing electric vibrations by direct electrical methods. His experiments are the basis of our wireless telegraphy.

In more recent years even more fundamental discoveries have been made, and the science continues to grow in theoretic importance and in practical interest. This rapid sketch of its progress illustrates how, by the gradual introduction of the relevant theoretic ideas, suggested by experiment and themselves suggesting fresh experiments, a whole mass of isolated and even trivial phenomena are welded together into one coherent science, in which the results of abstract mathematical deductions, starting from a few simple assumed laws, supply the explanation to the complex tangle of the course of events.

New York, London, 1939, pp. 31-36.