Language

Can someone please explain the word instantiate to me? The most conherent answer I could find was: to represent an abstract concept by a concrete instance; to create an object. I am sort of confused as to what this means. Thank you.

Comments

I guess that different philosophers adopt somewhat different usages here (it's one of those cases where you have to glean from someone's writings their preferred usage). It will be interesting to see what colleagues say. But speaking for myself, I think I use the word in two different ways.

(A) First, on my lips, since it's true that

(1) Barack is tall,

I'd be on for saying

(2) Barack instantiates the property of being tall.

Now, I treat properties as worldly items (part of the furniture of the world, so to speak), while concepts are ways of thinking of properties. In Fregean jargon: properties are in the realm of reference (what we think about), concepts are in the realm of sense (constituents of the thoughts we have about what objects have which properties). So, at least when I'm on my best behaviour, I'd not be too happy to say

(3) Barack instantiates the concept tall

since the relation that Barack (the man) has to tallness (the property) is different in type from the relation that Barack has to tall (the concept I use in thinking about tallness). So, to point up the difference, I'd rather say something like

(4) Barack falls under the concept tall

(5) The concept tall applies to Barack.

In this usage, then, "instantiating" a property is just being an instance of something that has the property. And there isn't an issue of especially "creating" an object to instantiate a property: Barack is there anyway, as large as life!

(B) In logic, though, there's a rather different usage, where we talk of instantiating a quantifier. Given e.g. the universal quantification (∀x)Fx, we talk of instantiating this to get a particular sentence like Fa. And I suppose we could say that, in a formal proof, we do "create" the instance as we write it down.

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