I agree with you that there are immediately obvious properties that I use to classify an object into a category, without reference to various other historical and systemic facts about the object. For example, as you say, I might classify a work of art as impressionist based on the precision with which it is rendered, or classify an animal as a dog based on various aspects of its appearance and behavior, or classify food as nutritious based on color, smell, and so forth.
It doesn’t follow that it’s somehow better to do so than to classify the object based on the less obvious historical or systemic facts.
If I categorize an object as nutritious based on those superficial properties, and later perform a lab analysis and discover that the object will kill me if I eat it, I will likely consider my initial categorization a mistake.
If I share your rule of thumb about “impressionism”, and then later realize that some works of art that share the property of being best viewed from a distance are consistently classed by art students as “pointilist” rather than “impressionist”, and I further realize that when I look at a bunch of classed-as-pointilist and classed-as-impressionist paintings it’s clear to me that paintings in each class share a family resemblance that they don’t share with paintings in the other class, I will likely consider my initial rule of thumb a mistake.
Sometimes, the categorization I perform based on properties that aren’t immediately apparent is more reliable than the one I perform “in real life.”
I agree with you that there are immediately obvious properties that I use to classify an object into a category, without reference to various other historical and systemic facts about the object. For example, as you say, I might classify a work of art as impressionist based on the precision with which it is rendered, or classify an animal as a dog based on various aspects of its appearance and behavior, or classify food as nutritious based on color, smell, and so forth.
It doesn’t follow that it’s somehow better to do so than to classify the object based on the less obvious historical or systemic facts.
If I categorize an object as nutritious based on those superficial properties, and later perform a lab analysis and discover that the object will kill me if I eat it, I will likely consider my initial categorization a mistake.
If I share your rule of thumb about “impressionism”, and then later realize that some works of art that share the property of being best viewed from a distance are consistently classed by art students as “pointilist” rather than “impressionist”, and I further realize that when I look at a bunch of classed-as-pointilist and classed-as-impressionist paintings it’s clear to me that paintings in each class share a family resemblance that they don’t share with paintings in the other class, I will likely consider my initial rule of thumb a mistake.
Sometimes, the categorization I perform based on properties that aren’t immediately apparent is more reliable than the one I perform “in real life.”