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Introduction: ‘So what’s in a category?’ - A jocular point made serious
Against normal academic practice, this article begins with a nubby joke, for the good of reason. It goes: ‘What is the difference between a Pilot and God?’ In reply it claims: ‘God doesn’t go around thinking He’s [sic] a pilot’. Whilst teasing pilots may on occasion be funny, it is less easy to tease the second categorical Ultimatum in an extraordinary comparison! The humour rests in an artfully forced, instantly appreciated mistake (absurdum) and transgression of ‘culturally cogent’ (Lombaard 2016:2) assumptions, connections, norms and values, in a testy fashion about philosophical relatives and absolutes.
No doubt ridiculously attributed, the joke tricks us into confrontation with endangerment of sanity, sin against the category and the uproarious result of disobedience. The joke works seamlessly in more than some social circumstances for its versatile applicability to pilots, doctors and philosophical relativist ‘pots’, calling realist ‘kettles …’. Even in the jocular sense, the category is a weighty weapon of reasoning, culture, science and society. Asking, ‘how weighty?’, is the task of this small musing. Thus to begin, by noting that the fleet-footed appreciation of the joke (in some contexts) demonstrates how a number of ontological, epistemological, semantic and social relations are assumed and referenced in common reception.
Merely from commonality, it does not stretch imagination too far, for us to understand that categories are conceptual building blocks in culturally and analytically cogent chains of reason, definition sentences in science and so on. However, the proving thereof eludes capture.
Defining a category?
Returning to the jocular experience, more than the clear semantic and other social links proposed by the joking, is a thin veiled assumption of realism, grounding our humorous and categorical effect. For our purposes, the joke instructs the quest for a broad working definition. We may read ‘category’ to mean:
* An assumption, type, concept or distinction which acts as a link in a set of conceptual (perhaps ontological, but certainly moral and scientific) relations, capable by their constitution of producing a sustainable chain of reason between definitions, theories, sciences and meta-theory, which they protect as quasi (minimal and falsifiable) arbiter, from numerous possible mistakes, contraventions, transgressions and confusions,...