Comments on: They’re All Unique (Revisiting a Concept from Fringe S2E8: August)

By: cordialdeconstruction

cordialdeconstruction — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:10:46 +0000

Again, the point was not that unique is an invalid word.

My point was that uniqueness is not exclusively an absolute concept, and that the word unique can be legitimately qualified with words like “more”, “most”, “less”, or “totally” in many contexts.

By: cordialdeconstruction

cordialdeconstruction — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:04:52 +0000

I’m not a professional mathematician, but I did take enough calculus and differential equations in college to earn a minor in mathematics.

It occurred to me when writing the post someone might bring up the concepts of mathematics and data sets/ solutions in regards to uniqueness, but I figured I’d leave that to any comments anyone wanted to make.

I perhaps should have concluded with, “If you can’t have degrees or qualities of uniqueness, then everything is unique, and the word is irrelevant for describing real world, materialistic objects and phenomenon.”

By: Phil O Sophic

Phil O Sophic — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 06:37:24 +0000

You’re not a mathematician, are you? “The unique … that …” is not an uncommon locution, and that there is one and only one object (number, set, graph, whatever) that satisfies the condition is the whole point. And in XML, for instance, all values of type ID must be unique, absolutely and not to some degree.

Of course, this is not exactly common, everyday English.

By: Bob

Bob — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 19:43:33 +0000

That all leads to our desire to catalog things in our universe. The lay person will say planet for every celestial body they’ve been told is a planet. They don’t deny that each one is unique because of those qualities you speak of. If we speak from a vantage point of a certain view of an object and when that object does something that we deem to be outside our established catalog of that object it become unique to us. It really becomes a matter of opinion at that point because obviously it is unique, it is just a matter of defining what your talking about. So in that an individual can have a degree of uniqueness because it falls outside there preconceived notions of the object. Scientifically it is a irrelevant; however unique to the non-scientific minded is a word that isn’t irrelevant.