Personality in Seagoing Ships
Résumé
Argues that there are valuating tendencies of active interpretability which, when undertaken by humans, lead to becoming a 'personality' in the stronger senses of the term. These tendencies can be expressed in informal rules and are not exclusive to human action but are underlying tendencies of a logically interpretable world as such. They can be suppressed or ignored in the creation of objects, such as many product objects of contemporary mass technology, which are consequently relatively impersonal. They can also be incorporated directly or potentially in human creations. Historic sailing ships - and seagoing ships in general - often exemplify their fullest incorporation, so that seagoing ships are highly personal objects, which promote high value active interpretation on the part of the humans that use and live in them.