Concepts Don't Work That Way

I always find it a red flag when it seems like an entire group of highly-educated people is doing something ridiculously stupid. If assuming the brain thinks in terms of necessary-and-sufficient would be really stupid, maybe that's not what conceptual analysts are doing.

The idea that our brain's fuzzy type-1 thinking can be translated into precise type-2 thinking is one of the foundations of science and mathematics, not to mention philosophy. I'd been drawing and seeing circles for years as a child before I learned that they were the 2-D set of points equidistant from a center point, but this latter definition accurately captures a necessary and sufficient condition for circles. Anyone who says "your brain doesn't really process circles based on that definition, it's just pattern-matching other circles you've seen" would be missing the point.

And this process sometimes works even with natural categories. Wikipedia defines "birds" as "feathered, winged, bipedal, endothermic (warm-blooded), egg-laying, vertebrate animals", and as far as I can tell, this is necessary and sufficient for birds (some sources say kiwis are wingless, but others say they have small, vestigial wings). Although birds are the classic example of a fuzzy mental category, like the "circle" category it turns out to have a pretty good necessary-and-sufficient definition after all. Likewise, "fish" are "all gill-bearing aquatic vertebrate animals that lack limbs with digits".

Even if the above turn out to be incorrect (we find an animal we intuitively classify as a fish that does not meet that definition), it's still interesting and potentially useful to have a prediction rule that works 99+% of the time. And someone who started out believing whales to be fish could, armed with such a 99%-rule, correct her error.

So even if our brains don't naturally think in terms of necessary-and-sufficient, it's not immediately obvious that it's stupid and impossible to try to come up with necessary-and-sufficient conditions for our categories.

There may be some sets of borders in thingspace which are better than others, in the same way that there are some borders for an independent Palestinian state that are better than others (even though we're not sure exactly where the border should be, sticking Tel Aviv in Palestine, or Ramallah in Israel, would be a mistake).

Fixing borders in thingspace can determine the status of edge cases. Sometimes this can even be useful; for example, if I am allergic to fish, then having a correct boundary for "fish" will let me know I can safely eat whale meat. I may not know exactly what chemical in fish causes my allergic reaction, or even know that allergy is an immune reaction to specific chemicals - but being able to draw the category boundaries accurately will "miraculously" predict that whale meat will not trigger my allergy.

Or more realistically, coming up with a set of criteria for "good" will help me determine that stoning homosexuals is bad, even if I previously didn't realize this. And philosophers have come up with some pretty good definitions for "good" that can do this - not universally accepted, by any means, but useful to those who know them.

I think you have a strong case against conceptual analysis, and some very intelligent commentary on where conceptual analysis does work - but it's all in Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory. This post seems to be attacking a straw man by accusing conceptual analysts of necessarily trying to model the human brain and then doing a bad job of it.

Why can't conceptual analysis be regarded as "Coherent Extrapolated Cognition"? Just because people are vague in their thinking doesn't mean that clarity is a vice.

ETA: I'm going to try to stay away from LW for at least a month, in the hope that this sequence will be finished by the time I revisit. I know I'm going to fundamentally disagree with a lot of it, but better to wait until it's done rather than quarrel with it piecemeal.

Yes, nothing much new for LW readers (since it's mostly covered by the "human guide to words" sequence), but still important point to re-harsh, and get people to read even if they are scared by the sequences. It's so painful to argue with someone who thinks words are precisely defined as Aristotle classes, and say things like "I've nothing against gay couples, but gay marriage is just impossible by definition". And yet when asked "what is a mother ?" they'll answer "someone who gave birth to a child" and when asked "what about adoption ?" and then they"ll revise their definition... Or when asked "what is a bird ?" they'll answer "something with feathers that flies", and when pointed to penguins, they'll revise their definition...

Lots of pointless arguments would be saved if more people were aware that words are fuzzy boundaries, not precise definitions (unless you're working in a very formal science, like maths).

“I think good philosophy basically just is cognitive science, plus math.”

What is mathematics, but the purest form of conceptual analysis?

Though philosophers have certainly not always been clear about what they are doing, much of the time they are probably better described as trying to find better concepts (better in respects including being clearer and more sharply defined) rather than trying to figure out what concepts we currently have. This is certainly true of Plato; the counter-examples in Plato aren't meant to show that, for example, Cephalus isn't accurately describing his own concept of justice, they're meant to show that the concept of justice Cephalus has is problematic and better concepts are needed. This is somewhat obscured by the fact that in the dialogues Socrates tries to show that people's concepts are problematic by their own standards, and more obscured by the rhetoric (including the doctrine of recollection) which phrases that in terms of somehow already possessing the better concepts without fully realizing it, but despite the rhetoric, Plato is clearly a conceptual reformer.

I take it that Mitchell Porter and Carinthium are making similar points, if I understand them correctly.

I think we can exaggerate the impact of this sort of cognitive science on philosophy. It's very important IF we start from the assumption, as most philosophy has since the 17th century, that we won't figure anything out until we can figure out how the mind thinks and what sorts of things it can think about. That is certainly one way to do philosophy, and still an important branch of philosophy today, but by no means is it any longer considered to be First Philosophy. For example, it's hard to see how much of Lakoff's work will be relevant to contemporary metaphysics. Understanding the mind's classificatory mechanisms does little to help us understand the nature of necessity and possibility, of time and space. To some degree, absolutely, it's not irrelevant. For example, some of Lakoff's work on how spatial information is encoded in metaphor is important for understanding how we conceive of space, and whether a certain conception is an illusion of thought or revelatory of the nature of space. But no very interesting or central question in the metaphysics of space has been or likely will be solved that way, but that is as much real philosophy as the sort discussed in this post.

I think this is a little unfair. For example, I know exactly what the category 'fish' contains. It contains eels and it contains flounders, without question. If someone gives me a new creature, there are things that I can do to ascertain whether it is a fish. The only question is how quickly I could do this.

We pattern-match on 'has fins', 'moves via tail', etc. because we can do that fast, and because animals with those traits are likely to share other traits like 'is billaterally symetrical' (and perhaps 'disease is more likely to be communicable from similarly shaped creatures'). But that doesn't mean the hard-and-fast 'fish' category is meaningless; there is a reason dolphins aren't fish.

[Sorry about the length; my brain didn't want to stop. I'll break it up into a couple comments if need be. ]

What if i interpret the above to show that philosophers should not do psychology? Certainly, figuring out the best way to reason has been as important in philosophy (if not more than) figuring out how we actually reason.

Sometimes philosophers screw it up and confuse a normative claim for a descriptive claim. Perhaps (and I am not committed to this as anything more than a possibility) classical Aristotelian categories are not the way we actually represent categories when we're being lazy or care-free, but when we are trying to reason with the highest certainty possible, Aristotelian categories work best.

Is there no natural human category which is truly binary, has sufficient and necessary causes, and is semantic? 'Electron', or 'quark' seem plausibly Aristotelian to my intuition, and are certainly semantic.

On the other hand, we may sometimes run into a target of inquiry which requires that we form concepts for its study, but there are no Aristotelian categories which do the job, due to the nature of the target. In this case, we should definitely use fuzzy logics and the like; but I wouldn't doubt that the closer your fuzzy sets approximate Aristotelian categories, the easier categorical inference becomes.

So, if you are simply claiming that brains do not always use Aristotelian categories, I agree, and think you have provided sufficient evidence for the claim. But this is not so much a hit to philosophers doing logic/philosophy coming from discoveries in cog-sci, as it a hit to philosophers doing cog-sci coming from cog-sci. However, if you would go on to say that we shouldn't treat categories as Aristotelian-lyish as possible in philosophy/logic, I would say that you have not done enough to show this (not to say that LW doesn't elsewhere).

That philosophers arguing about how the brain works (or any other question about what is going on out there) is fruitless, is not something I needed cog-sci to tell me. Philosophers have been warning against philosophizing when we should just go out there and look, for centuries. Those philosophers that involved themselves in classical conceptual analysis in the way you described, did not fail in that they failed to look at cog-sci; they failed in that they couldn't tell that that was not philosophy time, it was go check the world time; this is a much more general and fundamental mistake class than failing to update on a new piece of evidence.

I like philosophy as loosely cog-sci + maths (at least the epistemological/ontological/logic-ish parts). But I would prefer to add to it the normative part of philosophy. Not how do we reason most often (a question at least as psychological as it is philosophical, if not more), but also what is the best, least error prone, fastest, way to reason? (Psychology tells us how we reason/think, but it doesn't know a damn thing about how we should reason/think.) This is not an unassailable field. We could use the tools we develop in Bayes and Calculus to do much of this work deductively. Modern Bayesian epistemology is already moving in this direction. I might also add to philosophy the contrasting and bridging of how we should reason to how we actually do. Of course, this is not to say that that is all philosophy is. Many philosophers have also been interested in forming descriptions of the way things are put together out there, in the most general sense of the terms, e.g., the field of metaphysics. But anyone who is working in ontology, epistemology, and logic, on both the normative and descriptive parts is likely a philosopher.

so to summarize:

How we reason/think is the domain of Psychology/cog-Philosophy/Philosophy of science. How we should reason/think is the domain of logic/epistemology/ontology/Philosophy of science. Getting from how we do reason/think, to how we should reason/think, is the domain of general philosophy/rationalism. Formulating as complete as possible a cohesive, qualitative, general, and abstract description of reality using as divers a range of information as is available, is the domain of metaphysics.

I do admit however that of all of these fields which I think of as essentially intertwined, Psychology is the only one which appears on the list which is not traditionally thought of as philosophical. This motivates me to further investigate philosophy's relationship to psychology.

I am a philosophy major; and I think of myself as a philosopher. But maybe we should just say that philosophy is a dead field; and "philosophy" a hopelessly vague and outdated 2000+ year old term; but many of its tenants, open questions, and methods, survive (normally in some improved form) in the modern field of LW style rationality.

And BTW: I don't see why you can't just say that an item which satisfies some but not all of the necessary conditions for membership in C, is C-ish; the more it has, the C-isher it is; if it has all of them, it is as C-ish as possible, and if it has none it is completely non-C-ish. This seems to capture both the typicality and Aristotelian categorical views as one hypothesis containing both types of categories and inference. Is there anything in cognitive science to suggest that the brain's categories don't function like that? The term you use to refer to some set of necessary conditions need not be the term you use to refer to that set of conditions next week; as long as any category you use consistently follows the rules described above, for as long as it remains consistent. I'm sure someone else has proposed a similar enough idea, anyone know its name?

Before going too far down this road, I'd like some attention given to the notion of approximation.

For example, consider two theories of category formation: CFT1: categories have necessary and sufficient conditions for membership, and to answer "Is X a Y?" we evaluate the truth-value of the conjunction of Y.conditions as applied to X.
CFT2: categories have prototypical members, and to answer "Is X a Y?" we evaluate the similarity of X to Y.prototype.

It's pretty easy to show, using more or less the arguments you present here, that CFT2 is a much better approximation of real human categorization behavior than CFT1.

But it's also clear that CFT2 is nevertheless an approximation, not a full explanation. For example, it's pretty easy to show that human similarity judgments aren't symmetrical -- the classic though somewhat outdated example is "Cuba is more like Red China than Red China is like Cuba" -- which means that "the similarity of X to Y.prototype" is ill-defined: do we mean S(X, Y.prototype) or X to S(Y.prototype, Y) or something else?

But before we discard CFT2 for that reason, we should ask what we're trying to accomplish. Approximate solutions are useful in real-world situations, as long as we keep in mind that they are approximate. Prototype theory is adequate for a wide range of tasks. So we might want to hold onto CFT2 even knowing it's wrong.

Similarly, if we want to discard CFT1, it's not enough to show that it's wrong. We should also have some confidence that it's useless.

Philosophy by humans must respect the cognitive science of how humans reason.

But it need not and should not limit itself to muddled human thinking. Because we learned math.

This post (and the trend of lukeprog's posts) seem excessively focused on redefining philosophy to be default_human_thought++. Which basically makes a mockery of the whole "concepts already have their own fuzzy meaning and trying to redefine them arbitrarily is bullshit" idea.

You can make philosophy take into account cognitive science and the the average thinking habits of that one particular species as well as allow for other less arbitrary kinds of thought. But luke's posts so far have not done that. I consider them interesting but not quite the philosophy or meta-ethics that they present themselves as.

I do think that discovering that virtually all human concepts don't have cartesian definitions is a valuable step. I also can't think of a good way of discovering it other than what was actually done - lots of people try and try, and fail.

Along the way there were some successes too - maths turned out to work OK, and ideas like gravity and so on. The ones that did have cartesian definitions were so useful that we don't regard them as philosophy any more, which is a bit unfair. Philosophy gets to be the diseased bit - the bit that got left behind because nobody could figure it out.

The whole point of the search for cartesian concepts is that you can reason with such definitions. They are the useful ones. The rest - well, it's a swamp, logically speaking. It's worth trying to discover which ideas fit in which category.

I would never have thought an eagle to be atypical as an example of a bird, am I in a minority about this?

Upvoted for being clear, concise, and easy to read.

I found myself reading this book today thought I'd remembered someone on Less Wrong posting about it. So here I am.

I think your critique misses some really valid critiques provided by Lakoff of the entire rationalist project.

The sections on Quinne, Kahneman and Taversky(around p. 471) and around pages 15 and 105 are particularly good. 

What your critique misses is that when you use the lens of cognitive science to critique Lakoff's philosophy is that the body of work you are drawing on is already saturated with and informed by the assumptions you are critiquing. In Lakoffian terms, when we look at a brain scan and correlate activity in it to the words someone says, or to their selection of a set of options from a survey, the metaphor that informs and provides the interpretation for those words is already implicit in the words they say or the question asked to them. If I am already operating out of the "brain is like a computer" or "The I is the thinking I, Aristotelian, Cartesian etc metaphors then that is what I will interpret to be present in the brain. 

And if I am already operating in a certain metaphor, and so are the subjects in my psychology study then that is the metaphor that will guide my questions and their answers. 

Cognitive science did not spring out of a vaccum of objective anything. It arose out of a western, greek, post-enlightenment philosophy saturated people and scientists. So what they found, inevitably confirmed what they were looking for. Imagine if you will, if you were to give a tribe of Papa New Guineans, Indians, or any other culture influenced by any other philosophies the same tools of surveys, controlled experiment, and biological neuroscience. Would they have begun by asking questions that would potentially confirm the karmic nature of the mind? The God worshipping nature of the mind? Or perhaps something even more alien to us? And would they not find what they were looking for? And would they not take their findings as confirming evidence of their already present metaphors?

If the replication crisis has proved anything it's that cognitive science is NOT an objective activity that we can conduct devoid of bias or prior interpretation. 

Yes, psychology and neuroscience have something to do say about philosophy,  but you are merely using the assumptions of one metaphor, interpreting the world through it's lens, then using that lens to critique the idea of any lens other than the one you're using. Your conclusion is inherent in your premises and you are merely confirming your biases. 

Your crucial, unstated premise is that concepts with fuzzy application conditions can't or usually don't pick out determinate qualities or relations in the world. Because if they actually can pick out such qualities, then those qualities may turn out to be analyzable in terms of others, and conceptual analysts can just take themselves to be analyzing the semantic reference of our concepts rather than the confused jumble of neural events in which those concepts are actually stored.

Furthermore, that premise seems highly non-obvious to me. It impinges upon a ton of different questions. And it falls under the domain of philosophy of language, not cognitive science. So I think your claim that good philosophy just is cognitive science is clearly false.

Regarding your claim that philosophy hasn't produced any non-trivial conceptual reductions, that's a pretty controversial view. In particular, I think there are highly successful reductions of the concept of truth - see the SEP article on the deflationary theory of truth. And it's a lot harder to understand the concept of truth in terms of fuzzy pattern-matching than, say, the concept of socks.

I very much think that framing the idea of "cognitive science plus math" as "the embodied mind" and "a challenge to classical western thought" is a good way to attract strong thinkers from previous contrarian fields like feminist studies who have some important insights but have a sharp divide with mainstream philosophy's analytic methods, but may not have the kind of concrete framework for getting back to practical problems.

I wanted to begin with a clear and “settled” case of how cognitive science can undermine a particular philosophical practice.

I'm not convinced you have done that; consider:

The problem is that the brain doesn’t process music in terms of musical instruments, but in terms of acoustic spectra, so musicians have been using their intuitions to search for something that isn’t there.

There is a disconnect there. If your "true rejection" of conceptual analysis is only based on implementation-level details of how concepts are stored in the brain, then ISTM that you will reject many other manners of discourse based on that criterion, that you'd otherwise accept (this being the first example that came to mind). Worse, maybe you make an argument that works now but will no longer serve later, if and when our squishy brains are replaced (or extended) by something which does store concepts definitionally (and that may sometimes make sense).

However, your article makes clear (and we already know) that there are sufficient reasons other than "how concepts are stored in the brain" to reject conceptual analysis. Namely, that it leads down blind alleys and fails to clarify what it was supposed to. Arguing about definition typically turns out to be a fruitless endeavor, irrespective of our neural architecture.

The classical view of concepts, with its binary category membership, cannot explain typicality effects.

That's something of a straw man argument; as far as I can see you haven't really tried to repair the classical view of concepts in such a way that it can explain typicality effects. For instance, you haven't considered things like overloading - using the same word to refer to several concepts, which could explain the "fruit" results.

Your link to dualism early on is missing a closing parenthesis. I had to click a whole extra button. Thought I might let you know and save others from this taxing ordeal. Also, in the second block quote, there might be a typo, "philosophy close to the hone," instead of "bone".

There was a cognitive scientist at Mixing Memory who had a skeptical take of some of Lakoff's views on metaphors and was doing a chapter-by-chapter analysis of one of his books, but then he disappeared off the face of the internet. Still have no idea what happened to him, shame if he died without presumably signing up for cryonics.

Worth noting though that pre-cog sci philosophy didn't just take conceptual analysis for granted- there were plenty of dissenters. Also, as others have pointed out quite a bit of the history of philosophy consists of philosophers criticizing established conceptual analyses rather than trying to invent new ones.

Also worth noting that not all concepts are transparently finicky like 'fish' and 'justice'. Also, quite possibly: species, mass, time, object etc.

To be fair, definitions in the conventional philosophical sense do have their uses- they can reduce or eliminate ambiguity when they can be adopted in practice (in law, for example). A theoretical humanity which did use the philosophical version of definitions would probably be more rational.

A fairly influential philosopher named "Wittgenstein" made essentially this critique 70 years ago. Many philosophers still do conceptual analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but few think the project will ever work perfectly for any natural language terms (though a 99% accurate categorization rate is often completely realistic even with only a few conditions). Even fewer think this is the way the brain learns and stores concepts.

Prototype theory is a much better theory of how we learn concepts, but it doesn't lend itself to legal stipulation very well. For that you need necessary and sufficient conditions. So the old Platonic practice still has some value, even if we no longer think the conditions define an objective class boundary or form the core of our unconscious sorting algorithms.

That's not to defend all such analysis. Trying to define "love" or "art" in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions is probably going to be a fool's errand resulting in either a low rate of accurate categorization or a long, unwieldy list of conditions), as was the Gettier-inspired "search for a 4th condition" cottage industry in epistemology. (Though I think some things were learned in the attempt).

Recent news on this topic.

I don't see that we can get away from conceptual analysis so easily. There are a whole lot of cases where we make commitments to particular doctrines, beliefs, promises and so forth, as expressed in words.

Law is all about using articulated definitions and natural-language rules to decide disputes. And we find ourselves using terms like "cause" and "knowledge" all the time in law. Such terms also show up in daily life -- if I tell somebody I will do the best I can, it's rather important to me that I understand how they're likely to understand that phrase, and what sort of concepts that will or won't call to mind.

Certainly, different people are going to use terms differently, and even the same person will use them differently in different circumstances. But if I'm on a jury and somebody asks me whether the defendant had actual knowledge of the crime, and then asks me to justify my answer, I need something to fall back on other than "I put all the facts into my brain and the the neuron for 'yes' was more active than the one for 'no'."

In the Republic, Socrates isn't arguing 'justice' just because he feels like showing off -- he needs to explain, on the one hand, why challenging tradition isn't the kind of injustice that people should be killed for -- and on the other hand, why his pupils shouldn't overthrow the government for personal gain. Is there a better tool than definition and conceptual analysis for this social purpose?

Sure, definitions are often imperfect for capturing what I mean by a given term -- but I don't have anything better to use, and I think it would be a decent use of somebody's time to think hard about which definitions seem to pick out useful sets in ways that don't conflict too violently with how I previously was using the word. And It's also a good use of somebody's time to figure out where the sticky bits are with a definition and how we might refine the definition to do the right thing in that messy corner case. I do actually sometimes have to use imprecise terms precisely and consistently and pointing out that brains don't work that way doesn't remove the real social need.

For reference, there is a field of study which purports to do this sort of thing, Neurophilosophy. Not to be confused with Neuro-philosophy from the Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, which is merely the study of philosophy using brains.

In its standard form, conceptual analysis assumes the “classical view” of concepts, that a “concept C has definitional structure in that it is composed of simpler concepts that express necessary and sufficient conditions for falling under C.”

I suspect that I am a bit slow on the uptake here, but I'm not sure what's not true. (Something was thought and now we know it isn't so?)

On the one hand, I understand that a set might be defined as a collections of objects satisfying just a handful of necessary and sufficient conditions, and that humans often think about simple sets that are defined in this way. For example, the set of primes is particularly easy to define with just a couple conditions.

It seems a bit awkward at first, but I suppose I could also think of any human-defined set as a 'concept' for the person considering the set. So for example we have a 'concept' of prime number.

What about the other direction? Do all human concepts map to sets? In which case, are these sets explicitly defined in our brains by a set of necessary and sufficient conditions?

I would have guessed the answer should be "yes" for any concept that we're certain actually maps to a set (like the set of 'fish'). Even if we do have fuzzy boundaries for a category; this fuzziness could reflect our uncertainty about which set we're pointing to or uncertainty about the rules that make the set. (Doubtless I'm echoing some 15 year stale argument...) Explicitly, uncertainty whether an olive is a fruit could reflect either one of the following problems:

• The person isn't certain which set called "fruit" you mean. Do you mean fruit1 defined as all plant organs that have seeds, or fruit2 defined as plant organs that are exceptionally sweet?

• The person isn't sure what the conditions are for being in the set "fruit" and supposes that olives could belong to the set with some probability. That is, the uncertainty reflects their knowledge about the set rather than the fuzziness of the set itself.

Are we discussing whether a set maps to something 'real' in a person's brain? It seems natural to think of objects belonging to or not belonging to a set based on criteria -- is this not what my brain does when it thinks about a set like 'fish'? Does my brain do this sometimes? Or is the question whether my brain does this always?

Finally, is it possible to have a concept without defining a set? ... Perhaps if a concept is just pattern matching? For example, let's suppose I see the sequence 2, 4, 2, 4. I have a 'concept' of a pattern that it is alternating 2s and 4s. Have I necessarily defined a set (for example, the set of patterns ABABAB...) to predict the number that comes next?

In summary, I would like to understand more clearly the conclusion regarding what cognitive science has learned about the relationship between sets and concepts.

Eagles are lonely hunters who don't spend much time with other birds, are quite rare in numbers and only live in the wilderness. Robins however, are often seen near other birds, basically live everywhere and are also large in numbers. So mayhaps people choose Robin as the better disease spreader simply because Robin probably is the better disease spreader.

There are very many factors that may affect this kind of a test.. What do you think about the following?

If you were told that planktons had caught a disease, how likely would you think it would spread among other sea species? Now suppose fish had caught the disease?

Now, plankton definitely isn't the most obvious sea species, while fish is. Yet I dare suspect that people would select plankton as the better disease spreader simply because they are everywhere. I'm not certain though.

So, mayhaps, because people know how a disease spreads best among large populations, they tend to select a species which is large in numbers, or which they think to be large in numbers. Maybe people select the typical member of the group as the better disease spreader (when asked to choose between two), simply because such typical member is also likely one that people see often and hence they also believe it is great in numbers.

In essence, my point is: Maybe, when people are asked which one of two species of a given group are better disease spreaders, they select the one which is typical in the group of potential disease spreaders of species, and leave the one which is more atypical out.

I find George Berkley philosophy of immaterialism quite interesting to the extent of welcoming an informed approach to the philosophy of mind. He further contended that " objects exist independently of mind is not testable or provable by the scientific method, because all objects we would wish to examine must enter our awareness in order to experiment on them."

Although I am a firm believer that philosophy is just the tools we use to understand our own limited conditioning and environment (adjusted to a moment in timeframe) tends to lean more towards the idea that we are never truly close on explaining anything in regards of absolutes (truths or universals) but rather contribute into the developing of new forms of information processing. As we evolve or find new methods of stretching those mental faculties (which are the core essence of the foundations of our ideas of experience) we obtain new philosophical perspectives along the way and dispose of that which once was "truth" or "knowledge" passing forward as "belief". The Ancient greek pre-socratic Gorgias of Leontini had a strong philosophical argument, as the father of paradoxism he revolutionize our ideas of reality, challenged the essence of being, epistemology and ontology, which further pushed Plato to examine the immaterial world of Ideas, intangibles and abstractive forms, hence his works on platonic realism or platonism.

“I think good philosophy basically just is cognitive science, plus math.” Mathematics is a subset of the metaphysical abstractive conceptualization occurring by the mechanism of the brain and its relation to the physicalist body (and that with space which is annexed with time by the pre-disposition of perception). Therefore to a degree, our experience are actually paradoxical in basis, The contingency issue arises by intending to describe what is real with something that is originally limited into its constituent parts. The corporeal(body) generates the senses that feed information to the brain creating the immaterial(mind), the immaterial creates the idea of the physical through abstraction of the sensory perception (hence giving it definition and property); the two are essential for supporting the existence of experience( subjective empiricism) under limited parameters which only exit seams to be an upgrade-evolution of the senses. Since our capabilities of communication have advanced over the different levels of human development: from sight-feeling-hearing, to thought-forms, to signaling, to pictography, to linguistics, to written forms, to history and internet we have further organized our individual ideas into collective frame in which we become more interdependent of our connections than never before and our mental processing and understanding enhance exponentially, each time we enhance the way we view the physicalism under direction of the immaterial(mind). So is the mind what defines the body/object (experience) or the body/objects defines the mind? An Interesting paradox. Without the mind functions(come) what happens to the body? without the body functions(death) what happens to the mind?

An example of this would be a debate on "Qualia". Or the refutation of epistemological knowledge- "The sky is blue! " -is the sky blue? What makes the sky seam blue? What is blue to an innate blind person who never experienced that information processing? and how it is described from the experience of another makes it blue?...How much of "knowledge" is "belief" and its vise-versification?

While reading this i got the idea that this article is attacking the current standards for “how to order things in nature”

I have two things to say in response:

1. Direct Instruction and i guess the scientific method in general both claim/prove that you can cut reality at the exact joints required to make only those hypotheses that explain the thing available. (So we can come up with unfalsifiable set of data on what a “red” is).

2. Only real data about a thing should be stored, flat things that say something concrete about the thing. Categorizing the thing in a scale with other similar things, meta infomation, should be done for each unique question posed. For example: We store all the facts about dolphins in a database(like has lungs, has fins, has sonar), but not labels(is mammal, is fish, etc..). You can then query the database for things you want, for example, all things with fins, and then dolphins will fit the meta label, do the same thing for all things with gills and the dolphin will not be in the result.

In short: Labels are situational and should be clearly defined as to what kind of characteristic they scan for and what they’re use is.

As a knowledge designer. I would store all the simple facts in a database, and then use a conditional script to select the best label for any given query at that moment. This means i throw away the current concept of “fish” whatever it is, and make it concrete by asking: “What specific characteristics are you interested in for this particular query?” (We can decide on common queries that we want to make international standards, like we have now for fish, but we need to make clear in what situations that standard even means anything)