念了這個明白自己為啥是個文科生!
While such general categories are usually identified by philosophers according to quite abstract bases, scientists often work with more specific concepts and try to organize them from the bottom up into increasingly general classes. Taxonomists of plants, animals and minerals start with concepts like ‘lion’ or ‘silver’ and group them into such general classes as ‘carnivores’ or ‘metals’, then group these into more general ones like ‘mammals’, ‘chemical elements’, etc. Hopefully, philosophers starting from the top downwards and scientists starting from the bottom upwards should meet somewhere in the middle and collaborate to build a consistent scheme encompassing all concepts. In practice, however, their projects often pursue different aims, so that philosophers are interested in only the top categories and disregard the trivial details of everyday entities, while scientists prefer to stay ‘scientific’, without speculating too much about general categories.