Objective Mind

Does classification represent the world or simply a system of categories? Do historical changes in classifications represent corrections leading to true knowledge of the world or simply diverse, equally valid orders? Are there universal classificatory guidelines or are categories the product of relative criteria such as utility or familiarity? The relativist implications of these kind of questions were already confronted by Plato who formulated a similar issue with the “butcher metaphor” in The Statesman and The Phaedrus. In both dialogues, Socrates argues against the sophistic position that division or classification is arbitrary. He compares the activity of classification in knowledge to butchering an animal. To carve the animal at its joints, along what the dialogues call the “natural divisions,” is like classifying correctly. Socrates asks us to contrast this technique with the unskilled person who simply hacks away at the meat on the bone. The failure to carve is the failure to follow the divisions or separations that really belong to the object. Socrates even holds that there is an economy in the single correct division: “To bisect … according to natural division … we must in every case divide into the minimum number of divisions the structure permits.” ¹ In The Phaedrus he says: “We divide into forms, following the objective articulations; we are not to attempt to hack off parts like a clumsy butcher.” ² The lesson is that we cannot divide up, classify, or cut up the world just any way we please. There is an objective articulation and, thus, we must aim to mirror that articulation in our concepts. With these arguments Plato attacked the sophistic position that the concepts of physics, cosmology, and astronomy 97were inherently conventional and human choices, for which there was no ultimate justification. Plato’s appeal to simplicity or economy was not, as it might appear today, a pragmatic argument against conceptual diversity since Plato held that simplicity was a sign of truth. Later in the history of science simplicity became a substitute for the truth. ³ Plato’s distinction between matters of opinion (doxa) and matters of knowledge (episteme) demanded that conflicting claims about the world must be reconciled by a knowledge that reflects reality’s structure rather than arbitrary opinion.