It is said that we carve up the world at its seams. I doubt that there are any seams. We carve up the world in ways that are easy enough and that we find useful. But those requirements — that it be easy enough and that it be useful — underdetermine how the world is to be carved. So it is a matter of pragmatic decision making.
As we saw in my last post, carving up the world is what gives us the entities that we can talk about and is what allows us to say true things about the world.
I should say at the outset, that carving up the world isn’t an entirely conscious and deliberate activity. Much of the work is done behind the scenes by our perceptual systems. So, in part, this post is related to how perception works. So when I talk about us carving up the world, I am not restricting this to conscious activity.
Why it is hard
We cannot just look around and see what are good ways of carving up the world. To be able to look around and see, then what you are looking at has to have a lot of detail. But the detail that we see gets there because of how we carve up the world. So we cannot presuppose that it is available before we do any carving.
The Heretical Philosopher 