onsdag 22 maj 2013

On conceptualization, and Linnean systematics versus cladistics

If we conceptualize reality using single entities as starting points, then there is just one statement that can't be true: that classes are real, because conceptualization allocates single entities into abstract categories (ie, finite classes) via classes (ie, infinite classes, or types), and if it could, then single entities would instead be abstract, ie, it would tilt reality and conceptualization up-side-down.

This fact, ie, that this statement can't be true, is shown by that any such claim is either ambiguous between classes and categories, like the Linnean system is, or paradoxically contradictory between different classes, like cladistics is.

We can thus produce a compromise between reality and conceptualization, like Linnean systematics, or tilt reality and conceptualization up-side-down, like cladistics, but we can't fuse reality and conceptualization unambiguously, ie, truthfully. We can't, for example, describe a process unambiguously, ie, truthfully, but can just represent it in different aspects. The Unambiguous Aspect is simply lacking.

This is a fact we just have to accept. If a bucket is empty, then it is empty. We can't fill it with words. There is thus no such thing as a "true tree of life" (or Higg's boson for that sake). It would have been perfect if there had been one (or a category of Higg's bosons), but, unfortunately, there isn't. Entities are real, but neither a true tree of life, Higg's bosons, nor any other kind of entities, sorry to say, but only entities. These entities can't, sorry to say, be unambiguously allocated into any kind(s) of entities. Ultimately we are unambiguously left with just entities. We can discuss them, but we can't nail them. A single entity, like me and you, will never be unambiguously nailed to any category. This is a pain in the ass for typologists like race biologists, but it is a blessing for the rest of us.

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