In Where to Draw the Boundaries, Zack points out (emphasis mine):
The one replies:
But reality doesn’t come with its joints pre-labeled. Questions about how to draw category boundaries are best understood as questions about values or priorities rather than about the actual content of the actual world. I can call dolphins “fish” and go on to make just as accurate predictions about dolphins as you can. Everything we identify as a joint is only a joint because we care about it.
No. Everything we identify as a joint is a joint not “because we care about it”, but because it helps us think about the things we care about.
There are more relevant things in there, which I don’t know if you have disagreements with. So maybe it’s more useful to crux with Zack’s main source. In Where to Draw the Boundary, Eliezer gives an example:
And you say to me: “It feels intuitive to me to draw this boundary, but I don’t know why—can you find me an intension that matches this extension? Can you give me a simple description of this boundary?”
I take it this game does not work for you without a goal more explicit than the one I have in the postscript to the question?
(Notice that inferring some aspects of the goal is part of the game; in the specific example Eliezer gave, they’re trying to define Art−which is as nebulous an example as it could be. Self-deception is surely less nebulous than Art.)
I was looking for this kind of engagement, which asserts/challenges either intension or extension:
You come up with a list of things that feel similar, and take a guess at why this is so. But when you finally discover what they really have in common, it may turn out that your guess was wrong. It may even turn out that your list was wrong.
You draw boundaries towards questions. I can ask many questions about wine:
“Do I enjoy drinking wine?”, “Do I get good value for money when I seek enjoyment by paying money for wine?”, “Is the wine inherently enjoyful?” and a bunch of others. Answering those questions is about drawing boundaries the same way as answering “Is a dolphin a fish?” is about drawing boundaries.
Your list doesn’t have any questions like that and thus there aren’t any boundaries to be drawn.
As far as the question of “What is a dolphin?” goes at Wikidata at the moment is our answer “A dolphin organisms known by a particular common name” because the word dolphin does not refer to a single species of animals or a taxon in the taxonomic tree. Speaking of dolphins when you reject categorizations that are not taxonomic accurate makes little sense in the first place.
As the links I’ve posted above indicate, no, lists don’t necessarily require questions to begin noticing joints and carving around them.
Questions are helpful however, to convey the guess I might already have and to point at the intension that others might build on/refute. And so...
Your list doesn’t have any questions like that
...I have had some candidate questions in the post since the beginning, and later even added some indication of the goal at the end.
EDIT: You also haven’t acknowledged/objected to my response to your “any attempt to analyse the meaning independent of the goals is confused”, so I’m not sure if that’s still an undercurrent here.
I have plenty of comments at Zack post you link and I don’t agree with it. As Thomas Khun argued, the fact that chemists and physicists disagree about whether helium is a molecule is no problem. Both communities have reasons to carve out the joints differently. Different paradigms have valid reasons to draw lines differently.
In Where to Draw the Boundaries, Zack points out (emphasis mine):
There are more relevant things in there, which I don’t know if you have disagreements with. So maybe it’s more useful to crux with Zack’s main source. In Where to Draw the Boundary, Eliezer gives an example:
I take it this game does not work for you without a goal more explicit than the one I have in the postscript to the question?
(Notice that inferring some aspects of the goal is part of the game; in the specific example Eliezer gave, they’re trying to define Art−which is as nebulous an example as it could be. Self-deception is surely less nebulous than Art.)
I was looking for this kind of engagement, which asserts/challenges either intension or extension:
You draw boundaries towards questions. I can ask many questions about wine:
“Do I enjoy drinking wine?”, “Do I get good value for money when I seek enjoyment by paying money for wine?”, “Is the wine inherently enjoyful?” and a bunch of others. Answering those questions is about drawing boundaries the same way as answering “Is a dolphin a fish?” is about drawing boundaries.
Your list doesn’t have any questions like that and thus there aren’t any boundaries to be drawn.
As far as the question of “What is a dolphin?” goes at Wikidata at the moment is our answer “A dolphin organisms known by a particular common name” because the word dolphin does not refer to a single species of animals or a taxon in the taxonomic tree. Speaking of dolphins when you reject categorizations that are not taxonomic accurate makes little sense in the first place.
As the links I’ve posted above indicate, no, lists don’t necessarily require questions to begin noticing joints and carving around them.
Questions are helpful however, to convey the guess I might already have and to point at the intension that others might build on/refute. And so...
...I have had some candidate questions in the post since the beginning, and later even added some indication of the goal at the end.
EDIT: You also haven’t acknowledged/objected to my response to your “any attempt to analyse the meaning independent of the goals is confused”, so I’m not sure if that’s still an undercurrent here.
I have plenty of comments at Zack post you link and I don’t agree with it. As Thomas Khun argued, the fact that chemists and physicists disagree about whether helium is a molecule is no problem. Both communities have reasons to carve out the joints differently. Different paradigms have valid reasons to draw lines differently.