This is the first in a series of entries on ontology, by which is meant the study of being. What about being? Well, for one thing what it is to be. For another, what kinds of being are there? And, as importantly, what kinds of being aren’t? Being and beings are two very different things. Being is one of the things beings do. Beings are the things doing it. So next we’d want to ask, what kind of beings are there? And, as importantly, what kinds of beings aren’t? How do we  pick a token out of a crowd of various kinds? And how do we individuate one token from tokens of the same kind?

Much of this – if not all of it – will strike the uninitiated as nonsense. So to make it intelligible I need to make it matter. And what could matter more than …  

I. HOW TO CARVE A TURKEY?

Imagine a world consisting of a single object occupying the entirety of it. Then there’d be only one way to carve up that world, if ‘carving’ could even make sense in this case. Now consider a world consisting of two objects, which together occupy the entirety of it. Then there’d be two ways of carving up that world, the two taken together, and the two taken severally. A three-partite world could be carved up in four ways: a four in eight, and so on. As the number of constituents increases, the number of possible carvings increases exponentially.

Our world is made up of … Well, I won’t say an infinite number of atomic constituents, but certainly a helluva lot of them. And so there are a helluva helluva lot of ways our world could be carved up, were we both able and inclined. I say both able and inclined because this nigh-infinite number is honed by one or both of two factors: the fine-grainedness of our perceptual apparatus, and the uses we want to make of how we’re carving up the world. For the purposes of disarming a foe in battle, he’s made up of arms, legs, head, and torso. But for the purposes of triage what matters is whether the arrow pierced the heart or only a lung. At the battle of Marathon which quadrant of the heart would have been irrelevant. But when John Kennedy was brought to the ER that day, whether that shard was a millimetre this way or that made all the difference in the world.

Talk about Tom is already to have carved him off from Dick and Harry. But to talk about Tom’s race is to re-merge him with others of the same skin colour. We can see he’s either black or white. And we can as readily test whether he can or can’t roll his tongue. But we tend not to. Why? Because the former matters in a way the latter does not. What way is that? Prediction and therefore control. Even if we thought, as we’re being encouraged to today, that one’s race makes no difference, the fact that others have thought otherwise has made it otherwise. Race matters because people have decided it does. In fact for all we know the ability (or inability) to roll one’s tongue is the prime determinant of social stratification. But we don’t know it because we never thought to ask.

Of the nigh-infinite ways the world can be carved up, is there a fact-of-the-matter about which carvings are better advised than others? There is, but that advice is indexed to the purpose of the carving in question. If we’re trying to encourage women’s participation in sports, then trans women ought not to be categorised as women. So to say that so and so is a woman is not, strictly speaking, what logicians call a well-formed-formula. Well-formedness requires a for-the-purposes-of. For the purposes of taxonomy whales are mammals, because they’re warm-blooded and feed their young milk. But for toilers of the sea they’re fish, because that’s where they can be found. And so on.

Some people think – in fact many people think – that there’s something called natural kinds. That a cat is of one kind, a dog of another. But once again, for what purposes? Certainly not for those of the parasite living indifferently on either of their skins. For Noah, presumably, it was interbreedability. Otherwise he could have settled for only one of each.

But, it will be countered, surely there are better ways to carve a turkey, namely at its joints, and these joints are given to us by the nature of a turkey carcass. Same mistake. One could as readily say the banana was designed for ease of peeling. Are there discoverable regularities in the world? Of course there are. But the ones we notice and name are the ones we can put to our use. It’s anthropocentrism all the way down! As it is, ceteris paribus, for any other organism in the world.

Categories: pure philosophy

Tags: natural kinds, ontology