wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
>
> >
>
> You can really push this to the point where there are no categories
> of course. As to the second statement, it's actually kind of
> laughable. While there are distinct differences in courses of
> study. There are common conditions around labor status,
> professional goals, etc.
Our disagreements here are not sharp, but I think the question of categories is worth pushing further. I am a bit sceptical of almost all schemes of categorizing -- and recognition of the difficulty is not new. Someplace in Plato's works Socrates distinguishes the bad from the good dialectician with the metaphor of the poor meat-carver, who divides the meat cut by breaking the bone rather than cutting at the joint.
The think is, any category you care to name does, in some sense "really" exist. One can divide the human species into *taller-than 4'3"* and *shorter than 4'3"*. Those two categories are real -- & even relevant if we are looking for someone to reach the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet. Moreover, divisions depending on either personal experience or empirical investigations are often not useful. A classification is useful if it gives us prior understanding of individuals within that classification. But that use is nullified if there are too many exceptiosn to the rule.
And my suspicion is that the category "grad student" will show so many exceptions to any given description that it useless, even dangerous, as a predictor of how a given grad student will act or respond. And to pick a huge category -- I suspect "working-class" is a category utterly useless except during particular peirods of working-class militancy. When those periods end, workers cease to be workers and become merely residents of a territory.
' are real