The two entrances to conceptualization

There are two fundamental entrances to conceptualization:

1. assuming as an axiom that objects (like you and me) are real,

2. assuming as an axiom that classes (like human and chimpanzee) are real.

These two entrances leads into two orthogonal lines of reasoning (the white and blue in the figure below).

These two lines of reasoning thus have only two meeting points, in objects and classes, where they have two orthogonal meanings.

The former (ie, assuming that objects are real) can only reach internal consistency using an orthogonal system of classification, classifying objects into categories of classes (like the Linnean system), whereas the latter can only reach internal consistency classifying each class as two classes (like cladistics).

In relation to reality, the former is ambiguous, whereas the latter is paradoxically contradictory (Russell’s paradox).

The exits of these two entrances are thus either ambiguity or paradoxical contradiction.

It means that biological systematics can only choose between ambiguity (ie, Linnean systematics) or paradoxical contradiction (ie, cladistics) in relation to the reality it conceptualizes.

Biological systematists have a tendency to avoid taking a stand in this fundamental choice, instead complicating it, but it is just because there is no option of unambiguity. They simply rotate around this void option like a cat rotates around hot porridge. The hope that there is an option of unambiguity simply refuses to yield. Instead, the “Father of cladistics” Willi Hennig claimed, actually defined, that there indeed is an option of unambiguity, ie, The True Tree of Life, although his solution actually is the paradoxical contradiction itself.

When will biological systematics acknowledge that there isn’t any unambiguous conceptualization of the biological diversity to be found (independently of whether this diversity has a common origin or not)? When will they realize that the battle between evolutionists and creationists is not about belief, but about believing and not believing? Evolutionists do not believe, but assume, whereas creationists believe. Turning this battle into a battle of belief does not benefit evolutionists, because the idea of a single True Tree of Life is just as paradoxically contradictory as the idea of creation is. Biological systematics can’t defeat creationism by a paradoxically contradictory belief, but only by a strict scientific approach to the problem.

Another contribution to understanding of conceptualization http://menvall.wordpress.com/