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wittgenstein family resemblance site:blogspot.com
Philosophical Perspectives in Clinical Psychology
Essences and Family resemblances
perhaps even Wittgenstein - but certainly those who have taken his ideas to warrant talk of types of concepts called 'family resemblance concepts' - stray too far towards equating essences and necessary/sufficient conditions. Just because various instances of a phenomenon may have no one thing in common apart from their being instances of that one phenomenon - no one further thing in common, one might say - does not, I contend, imply that the phenomenon has no essence.
A worthy insight.
I think I know what necessary/sufficient conditions are. What is an essence? If I try to define it in a way that allows me to agree with the above, I can conjure only fanciful metaphors.
e.g. It's possible (likely, even) that the 'average' of a set of numbers does not itself appear in the set.
Here as always, the 'truth' of the average is a matter of what you're trying to do with it. So with essences, I would think.
In this metaphor of 'averages', essences are reductive. Is there a constructive version? I don't think so.
"It is far easier to analyze [someone] than to synthesize him."
(E.O. Wilson, Consilience, p. 83)
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