Joint-carving - 'The First Cut is the Deepest' c/o Traldi

Last Friday I joined in another online session of the Argumentation network c/o Andrew Aberdein and Kat Stevens. 

The subject was “The Epistemology and Politics of Redefinition” by Oliver Traldi.

As ever, it was interesting, technical, relevant and a prompt to concepts new, briefly encountered previously. I can't remember if in the talk, or Q&A, but mention was made of 'joint-carving' but I checked some sources:

'Because properties are so abundant, they are undiscriminating. Any two things share infinitely many properties, and fail to share infinitely many others. That is so whether the two things are perfect duplicates or utterly dissimilar. Thus properties do nothing to capture facts of resemblance. That is work more suited to the sparse universals. Likewise, properties do nothing to capture the causal powers of things. Almost all properties are causally irrelevant, and there is nothing to make the relevant ones stand out from the crowd. Properties carve reality at the joints -- and everywhere else as well. If it's distinctions we want, too much structure is no better than none.' p.346.

Lewis, D. 1983. New Work for a Theory of Universals, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 61(4): 343–377. doi:10.1080/00048408312341131

'Though the facts or truths that the realist judges mind-independent are most commonly put in terms of a kind’s ‘naturalness’ (or lack thereof), they may be formulated in alternative locutions, such as the ‘reality,’ ‘non-reality,’ or ‘artificiality’ of a kind or kinds. For example, that human races are not real, or that protons form a natural kind, both express such facts. Equivalently, Plato’s famous carving metaphor may be used to do so, as when it is asserted that the classifications of the DSM-5 do not carve nature at the joints. For the sake of expository simplicity I will exclusively use the language of ‘naturalness’ here, but translations into alternative terminology are straightforward.'

Franklin-Hall, L. 2015. Natural kinds as categorical bottlenecks. Philosophical Studies 172 (4):925-948.

Further, Sass writes:

'The goal is to have a consistent and informative test for what counts

as a realist versus an anti-realist view about natural kinds. Bird’s(2018) taxonomy,

building on Hawley and Bird(2011), focuses on the questions of whether natural

kinds exist, and if so, what sort of entity kinds are. Franklin-Hall’s (2015) taxonomy

focuses instead on whether kinds are individuated by a mind-independent principle,

or whether kinds “carve at the joints”.1 This paper focuses mainly on the issues raised

by Bird’s (2018) taxonomy.' p.11862.

Sass, R. 2021. An ontology of weak entity realism for HPC kinds. Synthese, 198(12), 11861–11880. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48692794 [ homeostatic property cluster (HPC) theories of kinds ].

In the past, I've written about the (nursing, IT, psychological...) models muddle. At the risk of adding to my muddle, Traldi's presentation is a timely prompt. Timely, because trying to looking at Hodges' model as a mathematical object, it needs to be stripped down to its bare components (and purposes?). Is redefinition the order of the day? I will leave defining the components to one-side at present (in drafted notes). But even from Hodges' model as a template, with its (two) axes and (four) domains we can (must) consider:

1. The two axes taken as a whole - do they intersect, or not?*

Relationally, the axis between:

INTERPERSONAL | SCIENCES

SOCIOLOGY | POLITICAL

INTERPERSONAL - SOCIOLOGY

SCIENCES - POLITICAL

2. Each axis (treated independently) to the centre of Hodges' model. (See 1.)

The conjoining of axes (do they?):

The INDIVIDUAL - HUMANISTIC and INDIVIDUAL - MECHANISTIC.

The HUMANISTIC - GROUP and GROUP - MECHANISTIC.

                                

Hodges' model

I won't continue now, but I have wondered if one axis is primary? Which one comes first? Faced with a blank piece of paper, or flipchart ... which axis gets drawn first?

In guided discovery workshops, teaching sessions I have been directed by the context and duty of care. Given that this is clinical then the I-G is where I start, or lead the discussion.

Perhaps, (as per the previous post) there is a safety dividend in having to consider this question more formally (forcibly)?

I remember Rod Stewart's rendition of  'The First Cut is the Deepest' - even as governments work to make this cut as shallow as possible.

The INDIVIDUAL - GROUP cut: has it every time.

Previously: 'argumentation'