Reading this shortly after the Diseased Thinking post is making me wonder whether the claim “Depression is an Disease/Illness” is another example of this.
In that post, the labeling of depression as a “disease” is described as a way of arguing about where the blame for it should be placed. Since many diseases like cancer are seen as unfortunate things that call for sympathy (rather than try harder!!!) categorizing depression as such is meant to evoke the same response. But ‘depression’ does differ in many substantial ways from what may be considered archetypal diseases.
Most of the examples given are about making associations between two things such that the negative connotations of one carry over to the other, but obviously you can also categorize something to try and transfer over some of the desired responses.
So good! Interesting thinking about the whole whether arguments take the form of establishing links between ideas (node metaphor) or enforcing new categorization (X is an instance of Y). The association-for-karma method seems almost like occupying a territory prior to the linguistic land grab of re-categorization/new identity ascribing.
If we think about the arguments for Pluto being a planet, they are obviously based on its traits. In the concepts sphere, we start with link building that will lead to favorable categorization once links are sufficiently well-established.