Re: how would we define "kin"?

[Mark P. Line]

glen e. p. ropella wrote:
> 
> [...]
> It might be good to simply say that any set of agents are "kin"
> if they are related in a historical sense.  I.e. if the event
> traces of any two agents have, at one point, intersected (were
> causally dependent), then they are kin.  This is more specific
> than "relationship" and excludes, I think, similarities in
> behaviour from providing sufficiency for kinship without necessarily
> excluding kinship from implying similarities in behaviour.
> [...]

> The one hitch of viewing kinship in this way is that we would have
> to tie a descendents event trace to it's parent's.

Why, if kinship is defined in terms of some causal dependence at some
trajectoral intersection? The parent-child relationship is just one kind
of causal dependence among many others, right? On your deifnition, the
guy who hauled my broken-down rental car to the shop 15 years ago in
Wapakoneta, Ohio is also my kin, for instance....


-- Mark

(Mark P. Line  --  Bellevue, Washington  --  <address@hidden>)



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