Introduction: Lessons from the Scientific Butchery

1.1 Tao and the Art of Knife Maintenance Good chefs know the importance of maintaining sharp knives in the kitchen. What ’ s their secret? A well-worn Taoist allegory offers some advice. The king asks about his butcher ’ s impressive knife-work. “ Ordinary butchers, ” he replies “ hack their way through the animal. Thus their knife always needs sharpening. My father taught me the Taoist way. I merely lay the knife by the natural openings and let it fi nd its own way through. Thus it never needs sharpening ” ( Kahn 1995 , vii; see also Watson 2003, 46). Plato famously employed this “ carving ” metaphor as an analogy for the reality of Forms ( Phaedrus 265e): like an animal, the world comes to us predivided. Ideally, our best theories will be those which “ carve nature at its joints. ” While Plato employed this metaphor to convey his view about the reality of Forms, its most common contemporary use involves the success of science — particularly, its success in identifying distinct kinds of things. Scientists often report discovering new kinds of things — a new species of mammal or a novel kind of fundamental particle, for example — or uncovering more information about already familiar kinds. Moreover, we often notice considerable overlap in different approaches to classifi cation. As Ernst Mayr put it: