“The Taxonomic Fallacy”

This seems like a good name for a widespread fallacy, a name that I’ve used about 4 times in the current project already.

It refers to the assumption that, if two or more modes of being have been identified, then they must be specially embodied in specific kinds of entity, rather than equally at work in all entities. In other words, listing categories of reality is not the same thing as giving a taxonomy of different kinds of objects.

Two examples come immediately to mind.

1. Heidegger’s Zuhandenheit/Vorhandenheit distinction. It is sometimes assumed (at times even by Heidegger himself) that Zuhandenheit belongs to a specific class of entities: notably drills, hammers, shovels, and the like, and perhaps also to other things that might intermittently be “used as a tool.” Meanwhile, other entities, such as Dasein, are said to have a kind of being completely different from that of the tool.

But the point of Heidegger’s philosophy is not to classify different types of entity, even if he slips into that language himself sometimes. The point is to define ready-to-hand and present-at-hand as two ways of being, and I have tried to show why any entity, including Dasein, must have both modes. Namely, an object can exist in its own right, or can exist in truncated and caricatured form in the experience of another object. A hammer is not “more” ready-to-hand than a chunk of dirt, even if the hammer is more useful; nor is a hammer “more” ready-to-hand than a person, even if ethics frowns on exploiting people but not hammers.

2. A more general and more damaging instance of the Taxonomic Fallacy is when it is assumed that the evident difference between human psychology and the causal behavior of atoms entails that human awareness (or sometimes animal awareness) involves a basic ontological rift in the cosmos.

My argument against this is the same as the one above against a typical reading of the tool-analysis. Namely, the basic difference is between objects in their own right and objects as encountered in relations with another. This must occur in any relation, and relations stretch to the very bottom of the inanimate realm, meaning that the key dualism occurs at an utterly more primitive level than our very complex human minds ever occupy.

In short, the (possibly correct) assumption that there is something special about human cognition compared with the lesser gifts of other entities does not imply that half of a primal ontological dualism can be granted only to one kind of entity– the human being. We are perhaps psychologically and cognitively and historically special as it is. To call ourselves ontologically special as well is merely a sign of vanity and greed.