I was just thinking about how the last time i learned any philosophy was 15+ years ago, so i wonder, what’s something y’all know about philosophy? Let’s talk about it!
I was just thinking about how the last time i learned any philosophy was 15+ years ago, so i wonder, what’s something y’all know about philosophy? Let’s talk about it!
My favorite is Lakoff’s category theory. He notes that philosophy largely pretends that categories are defined based on rules of inclusion and exclusion, but in fact human thinking is mostly based around categories defined by a prototypical example and various relations to that example. So, e.g., a penguin and a sparrow are both birds, but a sparrow is more like the prototypical bird, since it’s smaller and it flies.
Many of the great philosophical questions over the years have been about trying to decide on precise rules of inclusion and exclusion for categories, even though the closer people look, the less it seems like there’s a meaningful boundary (e.g. “life” vs “non-living,” where you start to see things like viruses, prions, etc. that don’t fit cleanly into either category).
Wouldn’t that be structuralism? Ie the truth (category in this case) is defined by the relations an entity (penguin or sparrow) has with some other entity (the example bird) rather than something intrinsic to that entity
Definitely related, yeah. Lakoff was primarily making a linguistic observation, but he did think it was reflective of the way humans really think about these kinds of categories, and that seems right.
That is a neat insight!
There is a whole category of misunderstandings that happen when contexts collide.
I feel like science tries to get specific so they can make predictions and explain phenomena, but using the same language the rest of us gives us things like the penguin and sparrow conflict, tomato is a fruit, strawberries aren’t berries, etc.
Meanwhile I’m over here like, not only can you call all insects “bugs”, you can call spiders, small arthropods, anything that fits the general vibe of small and bug-like, so long as you’re not causing misunderstandings in a scientific context.