I agree with you about the slaves, but I disagree with your not-quite-examples from physics; I think that these are false negatives, certainly as much as your examples of false negatives from mathematics.
People did once misclassify planetary orbits as “intervention by angelic beings” and falling down as “elements seeking their level”, but the real point of Newton’s law of gravity is that it developed an entirely new classification, “aspects of universal gravitation” for them; Newton recognised the previously unrecognised entity of universal gravitation. Similarly, while memes were not classified as “subjects of Darwinian evolution” until recently, we entirely missed the existence of Darwinian evolution for most of the history of recorded human thought.
Conversely, if you don’t agree that these are examples of entities that weren’t recognised as entities, why are (say) irrational numbers an example? People knew about the ratio of the length of the diagonal of a square to the length of its side; they just misclassified it as a rational number. But again, the important discovery was that there was such a classification as “irrational number” at all; that the cited ratio is an instance is only of secondary importance.
I think I understand your point; I started to disagree, but then I realized the source of the disagreement. Let me see if I can explain better:
I see a white-skinned Homo sapiens and I classify it as “God-made inheritor of Earth”, and I see a black-skinned Homo sapiens and I classify it as “soul-less automaton”, and (implicitly) consider the two categories disjunct and unrelated.
Case (a): I change my mind later, and re-classify the black-skinned H.s. in the first category. Ignoring for the moment the “God” part, this is clearly a mis-classification.
Case (b): I change my mind, and describe the first category as “evolved sapient creatures worthy of respect”. Technically I just moved all white-skinned H.s. in a different, third category, leaving the first one empty. But my mind instinctively doesn’t think that way: since the categories have the exact same membership, it feels as if I kept the existing category and I just improved its description.
(As far as I can tell, human brains by default don’t build categories as abstract concepts, then put objects in them, but build categories as collections of objects, then use abstract concepts to describe them, despite using words like “define” instead of “describe”. Brains that have learned how to reason formally, like mine and yours, also do it the other way around, but not all the time. I think that is the source of our semi-disagreement.)
[we’re still in case (b)] So moving white H.s. from “God’s children” to “Darwin’s” isn’t felt as a misclassification, rather as an “improved understanding of an existing category”. Then if I change my mind again and also move black H.s. in “evolved sapients” category, and then I rename it as “human” for short, this second part feels like remediation of a mis-classification.
In our history the first part of (b), essentially changing our understanding of what it means to be human, changed in many short steps. Since the category is very close (essentially, “us”), it mostly felt like “better understanding of a category” rather than “changing categories”. However, for whatever social reasons, the second part happened more abruptly, thus was perceived more like “re-classifying”.
I submit that gravity had the same structure: we knew rocks fall, and planets follow certain paths, our understanding of the first increased while we learned the laws of dynamics and the like. But the discovery that those are both consequences of the same thing was much more sudden (after all, black H.s. do look very much like white H.s., and the different classification stood for so long mainly because it was very convenient for some of the white ones; but planets didn’t look like rocks until we’ve had very good telescopes). So I can see why it feels more like re-classification for you. For some reason my mind feels the other way, as an evolution of the older categories.
I believe that, technically, the distinction is only affective. Technically, every time our understanding of the world increases, (formally) the old categories are emptied and their contents are distributed to new ones. But I guess the brain doesn’t work like that, as I said, at least in some cases it changes the labels of existing categories.
I’m starting to loose track of the original argument, but I guess we can at least agree that not all brains see re-classification and new categories identically (given our examples). Which is evidence to me that thinking in these terms for explaining how the brain works isn’t quite as useful as it might seem (identification of mis-classifications and missed categories might seem clear to one brain, but they might be mixed or reversed for others).
I agree with you about the slaves, but I disagree with your not-quite-examples from physics; I think that these are false negatives, certainly as much as your examples of false negatives from mathematics.
People did once misclassify planetary orbits as “intervention by angelic beings” and falling down as “elements seeking their level”, but the real point of Newton’s law of gravity is that it developed an entirely new classification, “aspects of universal gravitation” for them; Newton recognised the previously unrecognised entity of universal gravitation. Similarly, while memes were not classified as “subjects of Darwinian evolution” until recently, we entirely missed the existence of Darwinian evolution for most of the history of recorded human thought.
Conversely, if you don’t agree that these are examples of entities that weren’t recognised as entities, why are (say) irrational numbers an example? People knew about the ratio of the length of the diagonal of a square to the length of its side; they just misclassified it as a rational number. But again, the important discovery was that there was such a classification as “irrational number” at all; that the cited ratio is an instance is only of secondary importance.
I think I understand your point; I started to disagree, but then I realized the source of the disagreement. Let me see if I can explain better:
I see a white-skinned Homo sapiens and I classify it as “God-made inheritor of Earth”, and I see a black-skinned Homo sapiens and I classify it as “soul-less automaton”, and (implicitly) consider the two categories disjunct and unrelated.
Case (a): I change my mind later, and re-classify the black-skinned H.s. in the first category. Ignoring for the moment the “God” part, this is clearly a mis-classification.
Case (b): I change my mind, and describe the first category as “evolved sapient creatures worthy of respect”. Technically I just moved all white-skinned H.s. in a different, third category, leaving the first one empty. But my mind instinctively doesn’t think that way: since the categories have the exact same membership, it feels as if I kept the existing category and I just improved its description.
(As far as I can tell, human brains by default don’t build categories as abstract concepts, then put objects in them, but build categories as collections of objects, then use abstract concepts to describe them, despite using words like “define” instead of “describe”. Brains that have learned how to reason formally, like mine and yours, also do it the other way around, but not all the time. I think that is the source of our semi-disagreement.)
[we’re still in case (b)] So moving white H.s. from “God’s children” to “Darwin’s” isn’t felt as a misclassification, rather as an “improved understanding of an existing category”. Then if I change my mind again and also move black H.s. in “evolved sapients” category, and then I rename it as “human” for short, this second part feels like remediation of a mis-classification.
In our history the first part of (b), essentially changing our understanding of what it means to be human, changed in many short steps. Since the category is very close (essentially, “us”), it mostly felt like “better understanding of a category” rather than “changing categories”. However, for whatever social reasons, the second part happened more abruptly, thus was perceived more like “re-classifying”.
I submit that gravity had the same structure: we knew rocks fall, and planets follow certain paths, our understanding of the first increased while we learned the laws of dynamics and the like. But the discovery that those are both consequences of the same thing was much more sudden (after all, black H.s. do look very much like white H.s., and the different classification stood for so long mainly because it was very convenient for some of the white ones; but planets didn’t look like rocks until we’ve had very good telescopes). So I can see why it feels more like re-classification for you. For some reason my mind feels the other way, as an evolution of the older categories.
I believe that, technically, the distinction is only affective. Technically, every time our understanding of the world increases, (formally) the old categories are emptied and their contents are distributed to new ones. But I guess the brain doesn’t work like that, as I said, at least in some cases it changes the labels of existing categories.
I’m starting to loose track of the original argument, but I guess we can at least agree that not all brains see re-classification and new categories identically (given our examples). Which is evidence to me that thinking in these terms for explaining how the brain works isn’t quite as useful as it might seem (identification of mis-classifications and missed categories might seem clear to one brain, but they might be mixed or reversed for others).