Some things are this, and others are that. Some things are not like the others. We learn this. We know this. We depend upon our ability to discriminate between this and that. In a chaotic world, all is undefined and undifferentiated. Skeptics, subjectivists, and other agents of chaos are wont to undo that fundamental childhood skill of discriminating between spheres and triangles, lions and tigers, and boys and girls. If we are able to measure and cut reality along its seams, the skeptic’s epistemological pessimism is defeated. The subjectivist’s world-making is constrained. Today, for those who want to transcend our innate sexes, fuzzying the lines between male and female is the order of the day. The strategy goes like this. Instead of working from clear cases to understanding edge cases, the chaos agent argues from edge cases to deny there is any order or categories at all. Science News offers a typical example: “Biological Sex Is Not as Simple as Male or Female”. Surveying a variety of developmental sexual disorders and anomalies, Nathan Lents provides the conclusion: “These are not hard categories with clear definitions.”
The great changes which thus take place in the history of science, the revolutions of the intellectual world, have, as a usual and leading character, this, that they are steps of generalization; — transitions from particular truths to others of a wider extent, in which the former are included. This progress of knowledge, from individual facts to universal laws, — from particular propositions to general ones, — and from these to others still more general, with reference to which the former generalizations are particular,— is so far familiar to men’s minds, that without here entering into further explanation, its nature will be understood sufficiently to prepare the reader to recognise the exemplifications of such a process, which he will find at every step of our advance.
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Since the advance of science consists in collecting by induction general laws from particular facts, and in combining several laws into one higher generalization, in which they still retain their former truth, we might form a Chart, or Table, of the progress of each science, by setting down the particulars which thus flow together, so as to form general truths, and marking the junction of these general truths into others more comprehensive. The table of the progress of any science would thus resemble the map of a river, in which the waters from separate sources unite and make rivulets, which again meet with rivulets from other fountains, and thus go on forming by their junction trunks of a higher and higher order. The representation of the state of a science in this form, would necessarily exhibit all the principal doctrines of the science; for each general truth contains the particular truths from which it was derived, and may be followed backwards till we have these before us in their separate state.