PH3206 Essay Assignment

A0142356J, Aw Cenxin Clive

How far does Pluto’s classification before 2006 explain its classification after 2006?

The reclassification of Pluto from a planet to a “dwarf planet” is one of the more notable cases of of popular

science buzz in recent memory. This is quite simply because many everyday people were perplexed at how

scientists, who were mere men like themselves, would so boldly decry a celestial body. But what may be known

to a lesser extent is that the buzz surrounding the reclassification was not only found in everyday conversations

but also took place on the academic level. One of the reasons for this lies in how Pluto’s reclassification has

all the right factors to make it fertile soil for the discussion and debate pertaining whatever intuitions and

principles that result in the classification of “natural kinds”. These refer, broadly speaking, to groups and

labels that people use to describe, classify and learn about entities in nature. Hence, it is not hard to see

how the usage of natural kind terms is ubiquitous and unavoidable in science.

In this paper, I will be exploring the question of how far Pluto’s old classification prior to 2006 (OC) explains

its new classification after 2006 (NC). This should help highlight the many factors at play when natural kinds

are classified in scientific and social contexts. Now, in order to expand the depth of this discussion I will

take “its classification after 2006” to refer to “the situation surrounding the classification after 2006”, which

would include the “inertia” that worked against the reclassification.

I will argue that the OC explains a lot about the NC. Firstly, it gave rise to a kind of classificatory conser-

vatism, withholding Pluto from reclassification, hence explaining a great deal about why the reclassification

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process did not occur any sooner. Secondly, the OC also explains why the reclassification eventually did

occurred. This is because the OC reveals how planets, as a class of celestial bodies, was ripe for a change in

terms of the parameters that admitted and omitted entries. We now turn to the first of these two points.

The OC acted as a big factor in the reclassification mainly by virtue of classificatory conservativism (CC).

That is, the sense of inertia that works against removing some given thing from its current classification. But

one should ask what exactly explains such an inertial force. For the case of Pluto, it seems multiple factors

are at play.

Firstly, one aspect at play is that the anomalies that Pluto exhibited (which pointed to a need for reclassi-

fication) was known only after it had been classified with the solar system’s planets. If these anomalies had

been known before its initial classification and its classing as a planet was withheld from it, the CC would not

have emerged. It should also be said that anomalies, especially those known post-classification, do not tend

to necessitate reclassification. An anomalously large man is still a man. What ultimately matters is whether

the anomaly infringes the “classifcatory parameters” (CPs) that govern what is permitted into a class.

Secondly, CC’s impact on holding back Pluto’s reclassification has a lot to do with the so-called principle of

“no lonely categories”. This basically refers to a rule that it is not useful to have a classification or kind with

only one (or very few) members. When the anomalies were made known (namely, its waxing and waning

atmosphere, its extremely small size and mass and the fact that it has not cleared its orbit), it remained

unclear what else Pluto could be reclassified into. It was clearly not an asteroid or a star. There was simply

nothing quite like it at that time. So the closest class it could reside in was still that of the planets. Hence,

in avoidance of lonely categories, CC further held back reclassification. One can see how this inter-plays with

the first factor. If things had been different and Pluto’s anomalies were known prior to its initial classification,

it seems it could have been just left as something “unclassified” and hence this principle of lonely categories

would not have been such an issue.

Thirdly, how sentimentality augments the impact of CC should not be understated. Consider a hypothetical

scenario where the CPs that determine if a particle is a fermion are changed and, hence, tau neutrinos are,

due to this change, reclassified into some new class of particles. Let’s say that this reclassification, in the

immediate context of particle physics, was wholly uncontroversial. Would such a reclassification suffer as

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much CC as that of Pluto’s reclassification? It seems that the answer leans towards a no. The sentimentality

attached to Pluto, in clever acronyms, science textbook cartoons and elementary school nostalgia in general,

far outweighs the sentimentality attached to tau neutrinos. The sentimentality surrounding the OC, in this

way, does contribute to how CC results in inertia against the reclassification of Pluto.

So far, I have focused on how the OC augments the CC surrounding Pluto and how the CC in turn adds to the

inertia preventing reclassification. But it is untrue that the OC merely served to pull back the reclassification

since, in some ways, it explains why the reclassification did occur. Let me elaborate. The OC of Pluto

actually occurred mostly because there had been an ongoing search for a “Planet X” that would explain

strange perturbations in Uranus and Neptune’s orbits. Of course, it was not absolutely certain that the

explanation for these perturbation had to be found in some undiscovered planet, but that was, contingently,

the best guess at the time. Hence, when Pluto was found it was simply classed as what everyone thought it

was: a planet. Furthermore, during the time of the OC of Pluto, there were not very obvious or all-accepted

CPs for what it takes for some celestial body to be a planet.

In this way, we can see how the OC was that of a “Mill-kind”. This refers to a classification that were

classed due to a large cloud of common properties that are not implied or understood in the context of

a systematized, law-like framework. Very roughly speaking, a Mill-kind can describe a class that was not

generated in a strongly understood, scientific and theoretical context (eg. water classified by medieval people

would be a Mill-kind of sorts). Many philosophers of science think that as science progresses, Mill-kinds

become ripe to be “transformed” into “Pierce-kinds”, which are simply novel and more scientifically refined

classifications, rooted in strong theoretical frameworks (eg. water classified as H2 O would be more of a

Pierce-kind). So while the OC prevented the reclassification (mostly via CC and other augmenting factors),

it still sheds light on how planets as a class were ripe for some theoretical transformation.

More can be said to enhance this. Philosopher of science Matthew Slater suggested that there is a kind of

progression of what results in a taxonomy (a system of classifications). For Slater, meta-norms, which are

simply principles formed by the scientific goals and concerns of relevant research groups, result in classificatory

norms (such as the earlier mentioned “no lonely categories” principle), which in result in what parameters

should allow or disallow the entry of something into a classification. The goals, purposes and concerns of the

relevant science precedes the classification rules, which determine the parameters that define the taxonomies

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and classes. This can be summarized as such:

Where x → y, very loosely, means “x leads to y” in some epistemologically causal way.

Perhaps then we can suggest the addition of a further player into this chain of events:

This is because, for the case of Pluto, the discovery of a throng of so-called Kuiper Belt Objects (celestial

bodies at the fringe of the solar system that share various properties with Pluto) changed the theoretical

perspectives and scientific horizons which, in turn, seemed to have changed the meta-norms that guided the

relevant researchers and scientists. If this is right, it does help capture the dynamism involved in scientific

classification. As science progresses and succeeds, new goals and horizons set new norms which form new

taxonomies. Hence, to summarize, one can express the full theoretical chain of events, for Pluto, as:

Thus, understanding the OC goes pretty far in explaining how the NC occurred. Not only did it hold back

the NC (via CC and other factors), it also held the context for the NC to emerge (via the fact that planets

as a class was a Mill-kind ripe for transformation). Together, we see how this fascinating train of events

occurred and what it tells us about the broader philosophical debates.

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Word Count: 1425

References

1. Taylor, S. R. (1998) Destiny or chance, Cambridge University Press.

2. Slater, M. H. (2017) Pluto and the platypus: An odd ball and an odd duck - On classificatory Norms,

Bucknell University.

3. Hacking, I. (1990) A Tradition of Natural Kinds, Kluwer Academic Publishers.