“There is nothing natural about classes, families and orders, the so-called systems are artificial conventions.” — Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
“Whatever you might say the object ‘is,’ well it is not.” — Alfred Korzybski
Let’s also abandon the view that there are metaphorical turns of phrases and then there are real scientific explanations. All we have are metaphors, some better than others, to help us get to the next, more empirically interesting and generative metaphor. Good and bad metaphors are not detectable from our philosophical armchairs as errors that run afoul of some classic category; metaphors facilitate (or hold back) discovery to various degrees, as categories (life, machine, intelligence, goal, etc.) flexibly change with new discoveries in science. - mikelevin
Of course, there is some subjectivity in almost all science, and natural categories cannot always be ‘defined’. In a biological theory about hearts it might not be possible to define where a heart stops and the rest of an organism starts, or whether an organ in an organism is a heart or not. Any particular (subjective) classification of hearts might cause results to favour one theory over another. That said, over time, widespread experimentation smooths out the effects of this subjectivity. And the theories that ultimately prosper are those that explain the highest proportion of (everyone’s) empirical observations.
Link to originalThe more data you have, the less you want to use inductive biases.