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Feb. 24th, 2019 01:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feotakahariI read a post on mereological nihilism and thought it was fascinating and insightful. Then I realized I’d fundamentally misunderstood what it meant.
Let’s take dogs as an example. I interpreted it to mean that my dog, your dog, and his dog are all in some sense different. We can recognize that they’re similar enough to describe as “dogs,” but that doesn’t make them interchangeable. Furthermore, I would say that this is true even for mass-produced machine parts, as they’re unlikely to be absolutely identical down to every last molecule. In a sense, a category like “dog” is something living things impose upon the world, and we can impose different categories instead. We can say that we want to look at the “chihuahua” and “husky” categories separately, or put all of the “mammal” categories together, as we wish.
It was actually supposed to mean that a “dog” does not exist, just individual parts like a dog’s tooth and a dog’s eye. I like my version better.
Let’s take dogs as an example. I interpreted it to mean that my dog, your dog, and his dog are all in some sense different. We can recognize that they’re similar enough to describe as “dogs,” but that doesn’t make them interchangeable. Furthermore, I would say that this is true even for mass-produced machine parts, as they’re unlikely to be absolutely identical down to every last molecule. In a sense, a category like “dog” is something living things impose upon the world, and we can impose different categories instead. We can say that we want to look at the “chihuahua” and “husky” categories separately, or put all of the “mammal” categories together, as we wish.
It was actually supposed to mean that a “dog” does not exist, just individual parts like a dog’s tooth and a dog’s eye. I like my version better.
