4 ms·
I like to say "taxonomy is bullshit". Taxonomy is essentially building a metaphor or analogy. It's useful at times, but it often breaks down when you start loo
by bena 14d ago
I like to say "taxonomy is bullshit".
Taxonomy is essentially building a metaphor or analogy. It's useful at times, but it often breaks down when you start looking at it too hard.
Take everyone's favorite example: the tomato. We get into all sorts of discussions about what is a fruit, a vegetable, botanically or culinarily, etc, etc. Ultimately realizing that all plant matter is categorized as "vegetable" on the most abstract level. Thinking that one more layer of taxonomy will neatly box everything.
But it won't.
We call the iPhone a phone, but is it? I can call people from my laptop, my tablet, etc. I can watch videos and play music and write notes on my phone. Everything is everything, and nothing is what it is.
Classification is one of the hardest things because it's entirely a fuzzy problem.
- Waterluvian 14d agoYeah, exactly my thoughts. I wish these kinds of structures in science had been taught to me with a lesson on, "models are useful metaphors, not cosmic truths." Because they often got taught alongside the things that are much closer to cosmic truths (I see you philosophers lining up around the corner to argue that these never exist. Go on now. Git!).
- card_zero 14d agoIt's a fucking berry. No, I quite agree, I don't know what the point of saying that is either. Oh, let's link to "lumpers and splitters"! This comes up over and over again in a million contexts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters
- jl6 14d ago> We call the iPhone a phone, but is it? I can call people from my laptop, my tablet, etc. I can watch videos and play music and write notes on my phone. Everything is everything, and nothing is what it is. Fuzzy edges don't render the centers un-useful. Philosophical debates about the edges consume all the oxygen, but regardless of whether you think an iPhone is a phone or a computer or a television, it is definitely not a cricket bat. An inability to draw a sharp boundary doesn't mean classification has broken down, and it's nihilistic to conclude that real, meaningful distinctions cannot be drawn.
- Waterluvian 14d ago> it is definitely not a cricket bat. My son has empirically disproven this when he was four. He's also disproven that it's not a cookie.
- mcphage 14d agoThe problem is that we think of categories as this binary thing, when they're not. We recognize it with adjectives like "Tall"—most people wouldn't say "something is either Tall or it's Not Tall". But the truth is, every word is like that. The solution isn't more and more rigid delineations—the solution is accepting that the borders are wide, and plenty of object straddle them. To bring up an even more argued about example—is a hot dog a sandwich? Some people say yes, some people say no, but the answer can be (and most likely is) "kinda".