I’m not as hard on stamp-collecting as you are. Admittedly, you need some sort of theory for why the information you’re collecting is of interest, but if the information isn’t widely and and carefully collected, the theoreticians don’t have anything to work with.
I wasn’t trying to be hard on that kind of collecting, though I was making a distinction. To me, choosing stamps (as opposed to, e.g., butterflies or historical artifacts) as a type specimen suggests that the collecting is largely driven by fashion or sentiment or some other inner or social motive, not because the objects are of interest for piecing together a vast disorderly puzzle found in the outer physical world. Inner and social motives are fine with me, though my motivation in such things tends to things other than collecting. (E.g., music and Go and Chess.)
I’m not as hard on stamp-collecting as you are. Admittedly, you need some sort of theory for why the information you’re collecting is of interest, but if the information isn’t widely and and carefully collected, the theoreticians don’t have anything to work with.
I wasn’t trying to be hard on that kind of collecting, though I was making a distinction. To me, choosing stamps (as opposed to, e.g., butterflies or historical artifacts) as a type specimen suggests that the collecting is largely driven by fashion or sentiment or some other inner or social motive, not because the objects are of interest for piecing together a vast disorderly puzzle found in the outer physical world. Inner and social motives are fine with me, though my motivation in such things tends to things other than collecting. (E.g., music and Go and Chess.)