Aspect
What counts as a fact depends on the concepts you use, on the questions you ask. If someone buys stamps, what is going on can be described as “buying stamps,” or as the pushing of a coin across a board and the receiving of paper in return - or as a set of muscular contractions - or one of stimulus-response reactions - or a social interaction involving role-playing - or a piece of dynamics, the mere movement of physical masses - or an economic exchange - or a piece of prudence, typical of the buyer. None of these is the description. There is no neutral terminology. So there are no wholly neutral facts. All describing is classifying according to some conceptual scheme or other. We need concepts in order to pick out what mattes for our present purpose from the jumble of experience, and to relate it to the other things that matter in the world. There is no single set of all-purpose “scientific” concepts which can be used for every job.
Mary Midgley (1978)
Midgley speaks well for herself, I hope a long quote is appropriate. Her point seems clear, yet so widely ignored. Take the above photo: the man is buying meat, paper is being handled, physical bodies are moving in space, a social relationship is underway, economic exchange is happening, the story of needing meat and going to the market could be told, and so on. Commonly, we are cued into one of those aspects of the
scene,
Here is another page, that is very close in its ideas, and centres on Nagel’s writing.
but all (and others) have an equal footing, none is in some ontological way primordial. The wish to reduce this list, in the name of parsimony (as with the doctrine of Reductionism), simply involves throwing away aspects of our lives. We cannot view any object from all sides at once, so, of necessity, we cleave to one
aspect.
Ockham’s razor can be problematic, but our wish for noncontradiction is also damaging.
The mistake is to then claim that that choice takes precedence. Experience is indeed an infinite
jumble;
Famously James wrote of the ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’. that is experience.
and all thought and language attempts to introduce
order,
On the complexity of explanations.
but elimination can never be a substitute for organisation.
Beast and Man: the roots of human nature was the book that first made Midgley a well known name, although she had been broadcasting under her own name (Mary Scrutton) from the 1950s. The quote is from pages 5-6 of the 1980 Methuen paperback edition.
The photograph was taken in Đồng Văn’s market; the most northerly in Vietnam, in 2009.
Above, hovering on blue introduces a link: click to go, move away to stay.
Saturday 28th February 2026
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