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I'm pretty sure animal and plant species also existed as cultural and mystical concepts, long before science was a thing. All of your analysis can be applied eq

I'm pretty sure animal and plant species also existed as cultural and mystical concepts, long before science was a thing. All of your analysis can be applied equally well to species, as well as planets... Or the four seasons (winter, spring, summer, autumn) or the five Oceans, or the seven Continents. They're all simply human attempts to impose neat category boundaries across a continuum of natural phenomena that are definitely not neat. Categories can be useful, but they often lead to pointless arguments by lay people (a la Pluto's relegation) when we start to fetishize a human-created category structure as an essential expression of underlying reality. It's just plain old human narcissism.

hnbad 5y ago
I think this boils down to journalists trying to bait outrage by implying that scientific definitions should dictate cultural ones (tomato may be a fruit biologically speaking but if you put it in a fruit salad nobody will like you). Pluto is a "planet" in the same way the sun is "not a star". If you tell someone to draw some stars you'll be confused if they just draw a few massive orbs of fire rather than some bright dots. Before publishers discovered outrage bait as a way to sell ads, "actually Pluto is a dwarf planet not a planet" would have been an irrelevant nerdy factoid but now it's presented as a cultural issue everyone needs to have an opinion on. So I propose just giving scientists migraines instead and discussing whether the sun and moon should be considered planets or stars.
odyssey7 5y ago
You have good points here for scientific understanding vs cultural in general. I wasn’t specific enough. The planets formed as cultural concepts in the sense that they were absolutely divorced from tangible experience other than in their role as mere “wandering stars,” allowing them to exist as pure symbolic archetypes. The idea of Mars bringing war has little to do with the fact that it and related objects have cleared their neighborhoods. There’s a distinction here between the planets, which are the symbols that can be enumerated, and a planet, which is what the categorization problem for scientists involves.

hnbad 5y ago

I think this boils down to journalists trying to bait outrage by implying that scientific definitions should dictate cultural ones (tomato may be a fruit biologically speaking but if you put it in a fruit salad nobody will like you). Pluto is a "planet" in the same way the sun is "not a star". If you tell someone to draw some stars you'll be confused if they just draw a few massive orbs of fire rather than some bright dots. Before publishers discovered outrage bait as a way to sell ads, "actually Pluto is a dwarf planet not a planet" would have been an irrelevant nerdy factoid but now it's presented as a cultural issue everyone needs to have an opinion on. So I propose just giving scientists migraines instead and discussing whether the sun and moon should be considered planets or stars.

odyssey7 5y ago

You have good points here for scientific understanding vs cultural in general. I wasn’t specific enough. The planets formed as cultural concepts in the sense that they were absolutely divorced from tangible experience other than in their role as mere “wandering stars,” allowing them to exist as pure symbolic archetypes. The idea of Mars bringing war has little to do with the fact that it and related objects have cleared their neighborhoods. There’s a distinction here between the planets, which are the symbols that can be enumerated, and a planet, which is what the categorization problem for scientists involves.