Day 3585, Accidental Properties.

Daily picture, Definitions

Accidental Properties

The distinction between essential versus accidental properties has been characterized in various ways, but it is often understood in modal terms: an essential property of an object is a property that it must have, while an accidental property of an object is one that it happens to have but that it could lack. Let’s call this the basic modal characterization, where a modal characterization of a notion is one that explains the notion in terms of necessity/possibility. In the characterization just given of the distinction between essential and accidental properties, the use of the word “must” reflects the fact that necessity is invoked, while the use of the word “could” reflects that possibility is invoked. The notions of necessity and possibility are interdefinable: to say that something is necessary is to say that its negation is not possible; to say that something is possible is to say that its negation is not necessary; to say that an object must have a certain property is to say that it could not lack it; and to say that an object could have a certain property is to say that it is not the case that it must lack it.

Read the rest here:  https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/essential-accidental/

According to the AI

In philosophy, accidental properties are properties an object has contingently, not essentially.

An accidental property is one that a thing can gain or lose without ceasing to be what it is. Example:
– A chair being red.
– Socrates being bald.
– This book lying on the table.

If the property changes, the object remains the same kind of thing.

This contrasts with essential properties, which an object must have to be what it is. Example:
– A triangle having three sides.
– A human being rational (in the Aristotelian sense).

The distinction goes back to Aristotle’s Categories and Metaphysics. Accidental properties depend on circumstances, relations, or states, not on the object’s defining nature.

In short: accidental properties describe how something happens to be, not what it is.

Wikipedia

An accident (Greek συμβεβηκός), in metaphysics and philosophy, is a property that the entity or substance has contingently, without which the substance can still retain its identity. An accident does not affect its essence, according to many philosophers. It does not mean an “accident” as used in common speech, a chance incident, normally harmful. Examples of accidents are color, taste, movement, and stagnation. Accident is contrasted with essence: a designation for the property or set of properties that make an entity or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its identity.

Aristotle made a distinction between the essential and accidental properties of a thing. Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic theologians have employed the Aristotelian concepts of substance and accident in articulating the theology of the Eucharist, particularly the transubstantiation of bread and wine into body and blood.

In modern philosophy, an accident (or accidental property) is the union of two concepts: property and contingency. Non-essentialism argues that every property is an accident. Modal necessitarianism argues that all properties are essential and no property is an accident.

Read the rest here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_(philosophy)

Day 3584, ABSURD.

Daily picture, Definitions, Poetry 
Do you lift a roof over your head
or is the lifting
roof enough?

Do any of them keep the rain out?

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 1995

ABSURD, THE. A term used by existentialists to describe that which one might have thought to be amenable to reason but which turns out to be beyond the limits of rationality. For example, in Sartre’s philosophy the ‘original choice’ of one’s fundamental project is said to be ‘absurd’, since, although choices are normally made for reasons, this choice lies beyond reason because all reasons for choice are supposed to be grounded in one’s fundamental
project. Arguably, this case in fact shows that Sartre is mistaken in supposing that reasons for choice are themselves grounded in a choice; and one can argue that other cases which are supposed to involve experience of the ‘absurd’ are in fact a *reductio ad absurdum of the assumptions which produce this conclusion. The ‘absurd’ does not in fact play an essential role within existentialist philosophy; but it is an important aspect of the broader cultural context of existentialism, for example in the ‘theatre of the absurd’, as exemplified by the plays of Samuel Beckett.

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Day 3583, ABSTRACTION.

Daily picture, Definitions
Rørvik, 2019, Huawei P20 Pro

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 1995

ABSTRACTION. A putative psychological process for the acquisition of a concept x either by attending to the features common to all and only xs* or by disregarding just the spatiotemporal locations of xs. The existence of abstraction is endorsed by Locke in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (esp. II. xi. 9 and 10 and III. iii. 6 ff.) but rejected by Berkeley in The Principles of Human Knowledge (esp. paras. 6 ff. and paras. 98, 119, and 125). For Locke the capacity to abstract distinguishes human beings from animals. It enables them to think in abstract ideas and hence use language. Berkeley argues that the concept of an abstract *idea is incoherent because it entails both the inclusion and the exclusion of one and the same property. This in turn is because any such putative idea would have to be general enough to subsume all xs yet precise enough to subsume only xs. For example, the abstract idea of triangle ‘is neither oblique nor rectangular, equilateral norscalenon, but all and none of these at once’ (The Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, para. 13).

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Day 3582, ABSTRACT ENTITIES.

Daily picture, Definitions
Rørvik, 2016, LG G4

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 1995

ABSTRACT ENTITIES. The dichotomy between the abstract and the concrete is supposed to effect a mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive ontological classification. The dichotomy is, however, too naïve to be of theoretical use. There are many different ways, themselves vague, to mark the distinction: abstract entities are not perceptible, cannot be pointed to, have no causes or effects, have no spatio-temporal location, are necessarily existent. Nor is
there agreement about whether there are any abstract entities, and, if so, which sorts of entity are abstract. Abstract entities, conceived as having no causal powers, are thought problematic for epistemological reasons: how can we refer to or know anything about entities with which we have no causal commerce? Hence the existence of nominalists, who try to do without abstract entities.

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Day 3581, ABSOLUTISM, MORAL.

Daily picture, Definitions
Rørvik, 2015,

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 1995 

ABSOLUTISM, MORAL. The view that certain kinds of actions are always wrong or are always obligatory, whatever the consequences. Typical candidates for such absolute principles would be that it is always wrong deliberately to kill an innocent human being, or that one ought always to tell the truth or to keep one’s promises. Absolutism is to be contrasted with *consequentialism, the view that the rightness or wrongness of actions is determined solely by the extent to which they lead to good or bad consequences. A consequentialist could maintain, for example, that *killing is normally wrong because it creates a great deal of grief and suffering and deprives the person who is killed of the future happiness which he/she would have experienced, but that since, in some cases, a refusal to kill may lead to even more suffering and loss of happiness, it may sometimes be fight even to kill the innocent.

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Day 3580, ABSOLUTE.

Daily picture, Definitions
HP photosmart M22, 2006, Gratangen, Norway

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 1995

ABSOLUTE, the. That which has an unconditioned existence, not conditioned by, relative to, or dependent upon anything else. Usually deemed to be the whole of things, conceived as unitary, as spiritual, as self-knowing (at least in part via the human mind), and as rationally intelligible, as finite things, considered individually, are not. The expression was introduced into philosophy by Schelling and Hegel. In the English-speaking world it became the key concept of such absolute idealists as Josiah Royce and F. H. Bradley.

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Day 3579, ABDUCTION.

Daily picture, Definitions

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 1995

ABDUCTION. Abductive reasoning accepts a conclusion on the grounds that it explains the available evidence. The term was introduced by Charles Peirce to describe an inference pattern sometimes called ‘hypothesis’ or *’inference to the best explanation’. He used the example of arriving at a Turkish seaport and observing a man on horseback surrounded by horsemen holding a canopy over his head. He inferred that this was the governor of the province since he could think of no other figure who would be so greatly honoured. In his later work, Peirce used the word more widely: the logic of abduction examines all of the norms which guide us in formulating new hypotheses and deciding which of them to take seriously. It addresses a wide range of issues concerning the ‘logic of discovery’ and the economics of research.

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Day 3578, ABANDONMENT.

Daily picture, Definitions

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy

Edited by Ted Honderich, 1995

ABANDONMENT. A rhetorical term used by existentialist philosophers such as Heidegger and Sartre to describe the absence of any sources of ethical authority external to oneself. It suggests that one might have expected to find such an authority, either in religion or from an understanding of the natural world, and that the discovery that there is none leads one to feel ‘abandoned’. For existentialists such as Sartre, however, this sense of abandonment is only a prelude to the recognition that ethical values can be grounded from within a reflective understanding of the conditions under which individuals can attain *authenticity in their lives. Thus the conception of abandonment is essentially an existentialist dramatization of Kant’s rejection of heteronomous conceptions of value in favour of the autonomy of the good wil.

Find it here: The Oxford Companion to Philosophy

 

 

Day 3577, education.

Daily picture, Quotes

Noam Chomsky

on MisEducation

The topic that was suggested, which I’m very happy to talk about, is “Democracy and Education.” The phrase democracy and education immediately brings to mind the life and work and thought of one of the outstanding thinkers of the past century, John Dewey, who devoted the greater part of his life and his thought to this array of issues. I guess I should confess a special interest. His thought was a strong influence on me in my formative years in fact, from about age two on, for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into but are real. For much of his life-later he was more skeptical-Dewey seems to have felt that reforms in early education could be in themselves a major lever of social change. They could lead the way to a more just and free society, a society in which, in his words, “the ultimate aim of production is not production of goods, but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality.” This basic commitment, which runs through all of Dewey’s work and thought, is profoundly at odds with the two lead-ing currents of modern social intellectual life; one, strong in his day-he was writing in the 1920s and 1930s about these things is associated with the command economies in Eastern Europe, the systems created by Lenin and Trotsky and turned into an even greater monstrosity by Stalin. The other, the state capitalist industrial society being constructed in the U.S. and much of the West, with the effective rule of private power. These two systems are similar in some fundamental ways, including ideologi-cally. Both were, and one of them remains, deeply authoritarian in fun-damental commitment, and both were very sharply and dramatically opposed to another tradition, the Left libertarian tradition, with roots in Enlightenment values, a tradition that included progressive liberals of the John Dewey variety, independent socialists like Bertrand Russell, lead-ing elements of the Marxist mainstream, mostly anti-Bolshevik, and of course libertarian socialists and various anarchist movements, not to speak of major parts of the labor movement and other popular sectors.

…

Let me return to one of Dewey’s central themes, that the ultimate aim of production is not production of goods but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality. That includes, of course, education, which was a prime concern of his. The goal of education, to shift over to Bertrand Russell, is “to give a sense of the value of things other than domination,” to help create “wise citizens of a free community,” to encourage a combination of citizenship with liberty and individual creativeness, which means that we regard “a child as a gardener regards a young tree, as something with a certain intrinsic nature, which will develop into an admirable form, given proper soil and air and light.” In fact, much as they disagreed on many other things, as they did, Dewey and Russell did agree on what Russell called this “hu-manistic conception,” with its roots in the Enlightenment, the idea that education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with wa-ter but, rather, assisting a flower to grow in its own way-an eighteenth-century view that they revived. In other words, providing the circum-stances in which the normal creative patterns will flourish.

Read the rest here: https://www.scribd.com/doc/177531554/Noam-Chomsky-On-Miseducation-pdf

Day 3576, not enough.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book IV

330 Not enough! – It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!

342 Beware ofconfusion!– Yes! He considers the matter from all sides, and you think he is a genuine man of knowledge. But he only wants to lower the price – he wants to buy it

Day 3575, On the Improvement.

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Baruch Spinoza

On the Improvement of the Understanding
(Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect)

[1] (1) After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.

—-

[51] (1) Meanwhile, I give warning that I shall not here give essence of every perception, and explain it through its proximate cause. (2) Such work lies in the province of philosophy. (3) I shall confine myself to what concerns method – that is, to the character of fictitious, false and doubtful perceptions, and the means of freeing
ourselves therefrom. (4) Let us then first inquire into the nature of a fictitious idea.

[52] (1) Every perception has for its object either a thing considered as existing, or solely the essence of a thing. (2) Now “fiction” is chiefly occupied with things considered as existing. (3) I will, therefore, consider these first – I mean cases where only the existence of an object is feigned, and the thing thus feigned is understood, or assumed to be understood. (4) For instance, I feign that Peter, whom I know to have gone home, is gone to see me, [r] or something of that kind. (5) With what is such an idea concerned? (6) It is concerned with things possible, and not with things necessary or impossible.

[53] (1) I call a thing impossible when its existence would imply a contradiction; necessary, when its non-existence would imply a contradiction; possible, when neither its existence nor its non-existence imply a contradiction, but when the necessity or impossibility of its nature depends on causes unknown to us, while we feign that it exists. (2) If the necessity or impossibility of its existence depending on external causes were known to us, we could not form any fictitious hypotheses about it;

Read the rest here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1016/1016-h/1016-h.htm

 

Day 3574, Truth, Power, Self.

Daily picture, Quotes

Truth, Power, Self:

An Interview with Michel Foucault

Q. You are most frequently termed “philosopher” but also “historian”, “structuralist”, and “Marxist”. The title of your chair at the College de France is “Professor of the History of Systems of Thought”. What does this mean?

A. I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being. The way he thinks is related to society, politics, economics, and history and is also related to very general and universal categories and formal structures. But thought is something other than societal relations. The way people really think is not adequately analyzed by the universal categories of logic. Between social history and formal analyses of thought there is a path, a lane – maybe very narrow – which is the path of the historian of thought.

Q. In The History of Sexuality, you refer to the person who “upsets established laws and somehow anticipates the coming freedom.” Do you see your own work in this light?

A. No. For rather a long period, people have asked me to tell them what will happen and to give them a program for the future. We know very well that, even with the best intentions, those programs become a tool, an instrument of oppression. Rousseau, a lover of freedom, was used in the French Revolution to build up a model of social oppression. Marx would be horrified by Stalinism and Leninism. My role – and that is too emphatic a word – is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which
have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed. To change something in the minds of people – that’s the role of an intellectual.

Q. In your writing you seem fascinated by figures who exist on the margins of society: madmen, lepers, criminals, deviants, hermaphrodites, murderers, obscure thinkers. Why?

A. I am sometimes reproached for selecting marginal thinkers instead of taking examples from the mainstream of history. My answer will be snobbish: It’s impossible to see figures like Bopp and Ricardo as obscure. Q. But what about your interest in sociel outcasts? A. I deal with obscure figures and processes for two reasons: The political and social processes by which the Western European societies were put in order are not very apparent, have been forgotten, or have become habitual. They are part of our most familiar landscape, and we don’t perceive them anymore. But most of them once scandalized people. It is one of my targets to show people that a lot of things that are part of their landscape – that people are universal – are the result of some very precise historical changes. All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made.

Read the rest here: https://docs.preterhuman.net/Truth,_Power,_Self:_An_Interview_with_Michel_Foucault_-_October_25th,_1982

Day 3573, A Rationalist.

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Bertrand Russell

Why I Am A Rationalist, The Rational Habit Of Mind Is A Rare One


I am, in this age when there are a great many appeals to unreason, an unrepentant Rationalist. I have been a Rationalist ever since I can remember, and I do not propose to cease to be so whatever appeals to unreason may be made. We have listened to a speech, by which I think we were all much moved, about the pioneers in the past who have done what they could to promote the cause of freedom of thought. I suppose it is for me to speak about the great need of continuing this work in our own day, and about how much there is that remains for all who sympathize with its objects to accomplish. We are not yet, and I suppose men and women never will be, completely rational. Perhaps, if we were, we should not have all the pleasures that we have at present; but I think complete rationality is so distant a prospect that we need not be much alarmed by it, and the nearest approach that we are likely to get is sure to be all to the good. I certainly find that there is a very great deal of irrationality still about in the world.
While Professor Graham Wallas was speaking about the bequests that have been made to the Rationalist Press Association I was thinking: What is its creed, what is its dogma, and what is going to be the, so to speak, doctrine that these benefactions are going to be devoted to propagating? You have, of course, to be a little careful, when you find yourself landed with endowments and benefactions, lest you should become another endowed church. (Laughter.) As far as I can see, the view to which we are committed, one which I have stated on a former occasion, is that we ought not to believe, and we ought not to try to cause others to believe, any proposition for which there is no evidence whatever. That seems a modest proposition, and if you can stick to that you will be fairly sure that you are not going to become a sort of ossified endowed church. We ought not to commit ourselves to dogmatic negations any more than to dogmatic affirmations; we ought merely to say that there are a great many propositions about which men and women feel pretty certain, but, concerning which they have no right to feel certain, and it
is our business as Rationalists to try to make them see that those things are not certain. I am told that that is a very wicked position to maintain. I have here a book recently published which I commend to your attention. You may or may not know that some little time ago, under the auspices of the National Secular Society, I delivered a lecture on
“Why I am Not a Christian.” Now, It appears that I did not know why it is that I am not a Christian; and here is a book which will tell you why I am not — by Mr. H. G. Wood, who is a somewhat eminent member of the Society of Friends, a body for which I have the greatest respect. His book is called Why Mr. Bertrand Russell is Not a Christian. It seems that the reasons are not those which I thought they were. He says in one sentence: “The main reason why he is not a Christian is that he simply does not know what religion is.” One might say that Mr. Wood is not an Agnostic because he does not know what Agnosticism is. After all, I had all the benefits of a Christian education, and he did not have the benefits of an Agnostic education; so that possibly the argument might be considered two-edged. Nevertheless, I commend the book to your attention, and you will then know why it is that I am not a Christian.

Read the rest here: https://www.scribd.com/doc/286355411/Russell-Why-I-Am-a-Rationalist

 

Day 3572, Leviathan.

Daily picture, Quotes

Thomas Hobbes

Leviathan
Chapter 13. The natural condition of mankind as concerning their happiness and misery


Nature has made men so equal in their physical and mental capacities that, although sometimes we may find one man who is obviously stronger in body or quicker of mind than another, yet taking all in all the difference between one and another is not so great that one man can claim to have any advantage ·of strength or skill or the like· that can’t just as well be claimed by some others. As for Ÿstrength of body: the weakest man is strong enough to kill the strongest, either by a secret plot or by an alliance with others who are in the same danger that he is in.

As for the faculties of the mind: I find that men are even more equal in these than they are in bodily strength. (In this discussion I set aside skills based on words, and especially the skill – known as ‘science’ – of being guided by general and infallible rules. Very few people have this, and even they don’t have it with respect to many things. I am
setting it aside because it isn’t a natural faculty that we are born with, nor is it something that we acquire – as we acquire prudence – while looking for something else.) Prudence is simply experience; and men will get an equal amount of that in an equal period of time spent on things that they equally apply themselves to. What may make such equality in credible is really just one’s vain sense of one’s own wisdom, which most men think they have more of than the common herd – that is, more than anyone else except for a few others whom they value because of their fame or because their agreement with them. It’s just a fact about human nature that however much a man may acknowledge many others to be more Ÿwitty, or more Ÿeloquent, or more Ÿlearned than he is, he won’t easily believe that many men are as Ÿwise as he is; for he sees his own wisdom close up, and other men’s at a distance. This, however, shows the equality of men rather than their inequality. For ordinarily there is no greater sign that something is equally distributed than that every man is contented with his share!


Distrust·: This equality of ability produces equality of hope for the attaining of our goals. So if any two men want a single thing which they can’t both enjoy, they become enemies; and each of them on the way to his goal (which is principally his own survival, though sometimes merely his delight) tries to destroy or subdue the other. And so it comes about that when someone has through farming and building come to possess a pleasant estate, if an invader would have nothing to fear but that one man’s individual power, there will probably be an invader – someone who comes with united forces to deprive him not only of the fruit of his labour but also of his life or liberty. And the ·successful· invader will then be in similar danger from someone else.

Read the rest here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm#link2HCH0013

 

Day 3571, The origin of ideas.

Daily picture, Quotes

David Hume

Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Section 2: The origin of ideas

Everyone will freely admit that the perceptions of the mind when a man Ÿfeels the pain of excessive heat or the pleasure of moderate warmth are considerably unlike what he feels when he later Ÿremembers this sensation or earlier Ÿlooks forward to it in his imagination. Memory and imagination may mimic or copy the perceptions of the senses, but they can’t create a perception that has as much force and vivacity as the one they are copying. Even when they operate with greatest vigour, the most we will say is that they represent their object so vividly that we could almost say we feel or see it. Except when the mind is out of order because of disease or madness, memory and imagination can never be so lively as to create perceptions that are indistinguishable from the ones we have in seeing or feeling. The most lively thought is still dimmer than the dullest sensation.   

A similar distinction runs through all the other perceptions of the mind. A real fit of anger is very different from merely thinking of that emotion. If you tell me that someone is in love, I understand your meaning and form a correct conception of the state he is in; but I would never mistake that conception for the turmoil of actually being in love! When we think back on our past sensations and feelings, our thought is a faithful mirror that copies
its objects truly; but it does so in colours that are fainter and more washed-out than those in which our original perceptions were clothed. To tell one from the other you don’t need careful thought or philosophical ability.

So we can divide the mind’s perceptions into two classes, on the basis of their different degrees of force and vivacity. The less forcible and lively are commonly called ‘thoughts’ or ‘ideas’. The others have no name in our language or in most others, presumably because we don’t need a general label for them except when we are doing
philosophy. Let us, then, take the liberty of calling them ‘impressions’, using that word in a slightly unusual sense. By the term ‘impression’, then, I mean all our more lively perceptions when we hear or see or feel or love or hate or desire or will. These are to be distinguished from ideas, which are the fainter perceptions of which we are conscious
when we reflect on our impressions.

Day 3570, neurobiology.

Daily picture, Quotes

Robert M. Sapolsky

Behave
The Approach in this Book

I make my living as a combination neurobiologist — someone who studies the brain — and primatologist — someone who studies monkeys and apes. Therefore, this is a book that is rooted in science, specifically biology. And out of that come three key points. First, you can’t begin to understand things like aggression, competition, cooperation, and empathy without biology; I say this for the benefit of a certain breed of social scientist who finds biology to be irrelevant and a bit ideologically suspect when thinking about human social behavior. But just as important, second, you’re just as much up the creek if you rely only on biology; this is said for the benefit of a style of molecular fundamentalist who believes that the social sciences are destined to be consumed by “real” science. And as a third point, by the time you finish this book, you’ll see that it actually makes no sense to distinguish between aspects of a behavior that are “biological” and those that would be described as, say, “psychological” or “cultural.” Utterly intertwined.
Understanding the biology of these human behaviors is obviously important. But unfortunately it is hellishly complicated. 2 Now, if you were interested in the biology of, say, how migrating birds navigate, or in the mating reflex that occurs in female hamsters when they’re ovulating, this would be an easier task. But that’s not what we’re interested in. Instead, it’s human behavior, human social behavior, and in many cases abnormal human social behavior. And it is indeed a mess, a subject involving brain chemistry, hormones, sensory cues, prenatal environment, early experience, genes, both biological and cultural evolution, and ecological pressures, among other things.
How are we supposed to make sense of all these factors in thinking about behavior? We tend to use a certain cognitive strategy when dealing with complex, multifaceted phenomena, in that we break down those separate facets into categories, into buckets of explanation. Suppose there’s a rooster standing next to you, and there’s a chicken across the street. The rooster gives a sexually solicitive gesture that is hot by chicken standards, and she promptly runs over to mate with him (I haven’t a clue if this is how it works, but let’s just suppose). And thus we have a key behavioral biological question — why did the chicken cross the road? And if you’re a psychoneuroendocrinologist, your answer would be “Because circulating estrogen levels in that chicken worked in a certain part of her brain to make her responsive to this male signaling,” and if you’re a bioengineer, the answer would be “Because the long bone in the leg of the chicken forms a fulcrum for her pelvis (or some such thing), allowing her to move forward rapidly,” and if you’re an evolutionary biologist, you’d say, “Because over the course of millions of years, chickens that responded to such gestures at a time that they were fertile left more copies of their genes, and thus this is now an innate behavior in chickens,” and so on, thinking in categories, in differing scientific disciplines of explanation.
The goal of this book is to avoid such categorical thinking. Putting facts into nice cleanly demarcated buckets of explanation has its advantages — for example, it can help you remember facts better. But it can wreak havoc on your ability to think about those facts. This is because the boundaries between different categories are often arbitrary, but once some arbitrary boundary exists, we forget that it is arbitrary and get way too impressed with its importance.