Why do we have words for, oh, "phrenology" or "phlogiston"? Or, you know, um, "C... | Hacker News

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jrochkind1 on Feb 23, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: We Are Living in the Anthropocene

Why do we have words for, oh, "phrenology" or "phlogiston"? Or, you know, um, "Caucasian".

We've got plenty of words whose referents aren't sound concepts.

Retra on Feb 23, 2019 [–]

Naturalness is a useful abstraction. It contrasts things we will interact with through discovery to those we interact with through design. It is a sound concept, it is just biased to be human-centric.

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