Hi, I’m new to this site so not sure if late comments are still answered...
The issues you raise overlap with relatively recent enthusiasm for discussing “natural kinds” in philosophy. It’s a complex debate, and one you may be familiar with, but the near-consensus view in philosophy of science is that the best account of scientific categories/concepts is that concepts are bundles of properties that are/should be considered natural kinds based not on whether they are constructed or natural (a false dichotomy) but based on whether these concepts are central to successful scientific explanations. “Scientific” here includes philosophy and any other type of rational explanation-focused theorizing, and “success” gets cached out in terms of helping with induction and prediction. So the usefulness that you ask about can be grounded in the notion of successful explanations.
Here is a paper that discusses, with many examples, how concepts get divided-and-conquered in philosophy and science: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-016-0136-2. One example is memory—no one studies memory per se anymore; they research some specific aspect of memory.
Author, let me know if you want references for any of this.
Hi, I’m new to this site so not sure if late comments are still answered...
Late comments are generally encouraged around here, and we generally aim to have discussion that stands the test of time, and don’t ever shut down comment threads because they are too old.
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.
Hi, I’m new to this site so not sure if late comments are still answered...
The issues you raise overlap with relatively recent enthusiasm for discussing “natural kinds” in philosophy. It’s a complex debate, and one you may be familiar with, but the near-consensus view in philosophy of science is that the best account of scientific categories/concepts is that concepts are bundles of properties that are/should be considered natural kinds based not on whether they are constructed or natural (a false dichotomy) but based on whether these concepts are central to successful scientific explanations. “Scientific” here includes philosophy and any other type of rational explanation-focused theorizing, and “success” gets cached out in terms of helping with induction and prediction. So the usefulness that you ask about can be grounded in the notion of successful explanations.
Here is a paper that discusses, with many examples, how concepts get divided-and-conquered in philosophy and science: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-016-0136-2. One example is memory—no one studies memory per se anymore; they research some specific aspect of memory.
Author, let me know if you want references for any of this.
Late comments are generally encouraged around here, and we generally aim to have discussion that stands the test of time, and don’t ever shut down comment threads because they are too old.
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.