Followup to: Where to Draw the Boundary?
Figuring where to cut reality in order to carve along the joints—figuring which things are similar to each other, which things are clustered together: this is the problem worthy of a rationalist. It is what people should be trying to do, when they set out in search of the floating essence of a word.
Once upon a time it was thought that the word "fish" included dolphins ...
The one comes to you and says:
...The list:
{salmon, guppies, sharks, dolphins, trout}is just a list—you can't say that a list is wrong. You draw category boundaries in specific ways to capture tradeoffs you care about: sailors in the ancient world wanted a word to describe the swimming finned creatures that they saw in