Questions of quiddity

[stuartpb]

This is a meta-issue (suggested in #11 (comment)) to discuss the nature of quiddity (ie. what a thing is, and in what context two "things" can essentially be said to be the "same thing") - when two questions can be construed to be asking the same question, whether one project is essentially just a rewording of another project, etc) and semantics.

Appropriately enough, the first question within this issue is whether these are in fact issues of quiddity, or if perhaps a more appropriate term would be "haecceity", or "hypokeimenon", or "ousia", or "semantics" or "semiotics". (Shit is going to get incredibly meta incredibly fast in trying to communicate within this debate.)

Currently alluded to in the README with a line that will probably be rewritten to point to this issue:

The filename for each project is a UUID that will be used to describe that project for the lifetime of that project, plus the ".yaml" suffix.

Quantifying the "lifetime" of a project entails some philosophical questions: whether a significant change in the nature of a project results in a "different project" will have to be collectively resolved on a case-by-case basis.

This also hooks into many of the issues tendrilling off from #1, such as #12 (merging projects) and #11 (splitting and spinning off projects).

[stuartpb]

Funny thought: should there be a spot in project definitions for discussions of that project's quiddity? (The question of which projects the discussion would apply to being resolved as "whateva, whateva, I do what I want")

Maybe discussions of project quiddity should just be linked within proximity of whatever is listed for urls.info for the project (ie. linked within the issue discussion, where info is a link to a GitHub Issue, or linked in the README, when info links to a README)

[stuartpb]

Calling it now: there will probably be at least one README/essay that comes out of this discussion. (Can it really be said to be a discussion if I'm the only one talking? Well, that's a question of quiddity. Or is it? Well...)

[stuartpb]

Honestly, I should probably move this meta-wanking over the quiddity of quiddity to https://github.com/stuartpb/meditations, or at the very least https://github.com/stuartpb/barfspace.

edit: https://github.com/stuartpb/barfspace/blob/master/metaquiddity.md

[stuartpb]

I'm gonna go ahead and make the "quiddity" label

[stuartpb]

There's also - and this is the meta bit coming in - the fact that pretty much all questions in modeling / schema design are (practical) questions of quiddity (this is what should go into stuartpb/meditations). See, for instance, #10: is abandonment a stage, or can a project have a stage and be abandoned? What constitutes abandonment, anyway?