This is a nice crisp summary of something kind of like pragmatism but capable of more robust intersubjective mapmaking:
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.
To expand this a bit, when deciding on category boundaries, one should assess the effect on the cost-adjusted expressive power of all statements and compound concepts that depend on it, not just the direct expressive power of the category in question. Otherwise you can’t get things like Newtonian physics and are stuck with the Ptolemaic or Copernican systems. (We REALLY don’t care about Newton’s laws of motion for their own sake.)
This is a nice crisp summary of something kind of like pragmatism but capable of more robust intersubjective mapmaking:
To expand this a bit, when deciding on category boundaries, one should assess the effect on the cost-adjusted expressive power of all statements and compound concepts that depend on it, not just the direct expressive power of the category in question. Otherwise you can’t get things like Newtonian physics and are stuck with the Ptolemaic or Copernican systems. (We REALLY don’t care about Newton’s laws of motion for their own sake.)