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Originally Posted by Anthony
That's roughly what I mean by (A), but you can accomplish the same thing by describing them as similar or related, with a more inherent caution that they aren't the same.
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Yes, well, suppose, for example, that you have lived all your life on continent A, and all the sapient beings you've met have been Homo sapiens sapiens. And then you travel to continent B, and discover for the first time that there are beings there that look a lot like your kind, and carry on some kind of organized social existence and use tools and language and so on, but that also have striking differences and are not interfertile. You have the option of saying, "These are men of another kind," if you think the points where they resemble your species are of fundamental importance. And then you can define your species as one of the subtypes of "men." Or you have the option of saying, "These are not men, but are Xs, but men and Xs have a lot of things in kinds and both belong to this new larger category." And you would do that if you thought that some things about your species that Xs didn't share were really fundamental.
And to a large degree this reflects your estimate of what's important for your purposes.
I mean, for example, when Maxwell came up with the theory of electromagnetic radiation, a lot of physicists went too far in comparing it with acoustic radiation, or water waves, or other mechanical processes, and thought that there had to be a medium (the luminiferous ether) and that it was possible to go faster than light just as it was possible to go faster than sound and various other ideas that proved prolematic or misleading. But if physicists instead had outright rejected all analogies, the investigation of electromagnetism would have been seriously slowed, or maybe stalled. The use of analogies is fundamental to theoretical innovation; if you want to get the payoff you have to take some risks.