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Lawyers have a saying: "Hard cases make bad precedent." I think a version of that applies here. ("Hard cases make bad definitions"?) We have a real and observ
by munch117 3y ago
Lawyers have a saying: "Hard cases make bad precedent."
I think a version of that applies here. ("Hard cases make bad definitions"?) We have a real and observable phenomenon surrounding us, and we have a name for it, 'life'. If we seek out border cases that may or may not be a part of this group of things, then that doesn't really help us describe what the main body of this thing is.
Life is not an abstract thing, it is something concrete that we see around us with cells and stuff. To some extent viruses and fire fit in the group of living things, but they're outliers. We can arbitrarily decide either that they are life, or arbitrarily decide that they are not life, if we want the word "life" to be precisely defined. But whatever we choose, it doesn't tell us anything about life.
- karmakaze 3y agoLet's say there was a fractal set that included members that has a 'life' property, but that we had no simple test or definition. Looking at the boundaries of what's in or outside the set would be futile as we could indefinitely split hairs and find examples that are successively closer to being in but actually out. This isn't to say that such a set doesn't exist.
- joenot443 3y agoWell said. My immediate thought was to a legal expression as well, "de minimis non curat lex", "the law does not concern itself with trifles." Leveraging edge cases to form one's understanding of a concept seems to leave one more concerned with the marginal than the broader topic at hand. It's a well written article, just not how I personally aim to taxonomize these days.