Hey Cobblepot. Super useful link. I was not aware of that concept handle, “conceptual fragmentation”—helps fill in the picture. Not surprising someone else has gotten frustrated with the endless “What is X?” philosophizing.
It sounds to me like this idea of “successful” looks a lot like the “bettabilitarian” view of the American pragmatists, like CS Peirce—the cash value of a theory is how it performs predictively. Does that sound right to you? Some links to evolutionary epistemology—what “works” sticks around as theory, what fails to work gets kicked out.
Memory is a really good example of how necessary divide-and-conquer is to scientific practice, I think. So much of what we think of as a natural kind, or atomic, is really just a pragmatically useful conflation. E.g., there are a bunch of things that form a set primarily because in our everyday lives they’re functionally equivalent. So to a layperson dirt is just dirt, one kind of dirt’s the same as the next. To the farmer, subtle differences in composition have serious effects for growing crops, so you carve “dirt” up into a hundred kinds based on how much clay and sand is in it.
Hey Cobblepot. Super useful link. I was not aware of that concept handle, “conceptual fragmentation”—helps fill in the picture. Not surprising someone else has gotten frustrated with the endless “What is X?” philosophizing.
It sounds to me like this idea of “successful” looks a lot like the “bettabilitarian” view of the American pragmatists, like CS Peirce—the cash value of a theory is how it performs predictively. Does that sound right to you? Some links to evolutionary epistemology—what “works” sticks around as theory, what fails to work gets kicked out.
Memory is a really good example of how necessary divide-and-conquer is to scientific practice, I think. So much of what we think of as a natural kind, or atomic, is really just a pragmatically useful conflation. E.g., there are a bunch of things that form a set primarily because in our everyday lives they’re functionally equivalent. So to a layperson dirt is just dirt, one kind of dirt’s the same as the next. To the farmer, subtle differences in composition have serious effects for growing crops, so you carve “dirt” up into a hundred kinds based on how much clay and sand is in it.