Читать книгу This Is Metaphysics - Kris McDaniel - Страница 14

1.1 This chapter focuses on the common‐place activity of distinguishing and classifying objects of various kinds. You might wonder: Why start a book on metaphysics with a discussion of classification?

1.2 There are a couple of reasons. First, lurking behind this common‐place activity are a lot of metaphysical puzzles and questions! One of the cool things you’ll discover as you study metaphysics is that the world is a lot more complicated and much stranger than you initially might have thought. A good way to illustrate this is to start with something down‐to‐earth and rooted in our ordinary ways of thinking and talking. Once you see that even something that is seemingly straightforward has a tangle of puzzles hiding behind it, you’ll start to suspect that philosophical perplexities can arise about pretty much anything.

1.3 Second, the metaphysics of classification will provide a nice springboard for the discussions to follow on the metaphysics of properties (in Chapter 2) and the metaphysics of parts and wholes (in Chapter 3). These parts of metaphysics are somewhat more abstract than the more down‐to‐earth things we’ll begin with here, but they are intimately related to the metaphysics of classification, as we will see later on.

1.4 Let me give you a breakdown of this chapter. In Section 1.2, I will introduce and explain a distinction between two different ways of classifying objects: an objective and a subjective way. In Section 1.3, I will discuss some cases in which it seems that we have mistakenly taken a merely subjective classification to be an objective one. But even if we sometimes do make this sort of mistake, it does seem like we still often succeed in objectively classifying objects. Section 1.4 will present an argument for the conclusion that some things do objectively belong to each other. In Section 1.5, we will explore the question of what it takes for things to objectively belong together. This will naturally lead us to a discussion of the connection between the metaphysics of classification and the metaphysics of properties in Section 1.6. (And Chapter 2 will be focused more generally on the metaphysics of properties.) Finally, in Section 1.7, we’ll close with some further questions about classification to consider.