{"id":69123,"date":"2012-05-08T00:01:43","date_gmt":"2012-05-08T08:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=16631"},"modified":"2012-05-08T00:01:43","modified_gmt":"2012-05-08T08:01:43","slug":"reification-is-alright-by-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2012\/05\/08\/reification-is-alright-by-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Reification is alright by me!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Long time readers know that I&#8217;m generally OK with <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Reification\">reification<\/a>\u00a0as long as we don&#8217;t take it too seriously. And we do that all the time. An &#8220;object&#8221; is really only an &#8220;object&#8221; in a human-sense. Reduced down to particle physics it is an altogether different entity. But on the human-scale asserting that a chair is indeed a chair, rather than cellulose, etc., (or now, <a href=\"http:\/\/plasticless.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/plastic_chair_seymour_magis.jpg\">polymers<\/a>), and further down basic macromolecules, is a useful &#8220;fudge.&#8221; Similarly, I&#8217;m generally skeptical of the idea that we have a clear &amp; distinct model for what a &#8220;species&#8221; is. The framework is very different when you&#8217;re talking about prokaryotes, as opposed to plants, as opposed to mammals. The question is not species, but what utility or <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Instrumental_value\">instrumental<\/a> value does the category or class species have?<\/p>\n<p>For most of the stuff I&#8217;m concerned with, the messy shapes of reality which are the purview of biological science, we are all fundamentally <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Nominalism\">nominalists in our metaphysic<\/a>. We may accept that we&#8217;re idealists in the sense of cognitive or evolutionary psychology, <strong>but human intuition does not make it so<\/strong>. The categories and classes we construct are simply the semantic sugar which makes the reality go down &#8230;<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/uYpGom-yG0M\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Long time readers know that I&#8217;m generally OK with reification\u00a0as long as we don&#8217;t take it too seriously. And we do that all the time. An &#8220;object&#8221; is really only an &#8220;object&#8221; in a human-sense. Reduced down to particle&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthroplogy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69123"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69734,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69123\/revisions\/69734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}