by Angela Guess
Malcolm Chisholm offered some insight into the sometimes complicated idea of state and the related idea of status as they apply to data management. Chisholm writes, “One of my favorite logic authors is George Hayward Joyce. He defined state as ‘a condition of stable being.’ A better way of expressing this to a modern audience might be ‘a condition of stable existence.’ But even that description is not all that informative. I think that the ‘stable existence’ part means that an instance of an entity type has a fixed set of attributes and this fixed set of attributes is part of the overall definition of the entity type. But the attributes appear in different groups during the life of an instance of an entity type.”
He continues, “Changes of state also need to be explained. In a change of state, there is a transition in which there is no stability. If there were stability, there would be an intermediate state. It is therefore a contradiction to use the definition of state discussed here to speak of a ‘state of transition’ because in a transition there is no stable condition of existence – in other words, no state. Another feature of transitions in data management is that for the entity types whose data we manage, transitions often seem to be instantaneous. This is interesting and also, I think, simplifies the data management tasks. However, transitions between states cannot be guaranteed to be instantaneous for every entity type. It is not clear to me what data we might want to capture about a transition, other than when it began and ended and what (or who) caused it to happen. We cannot deal with this problem here, but it is certainly something for data managers to think about.”
photo credit: swanksalot
