Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags:
Countries are social fictions. It is much easier for a country to disappear than for a city to disappear, so when you're saying that the small thing is contained by the large thing, you're actually mixing radically different kinds of entities. We pretend that 'country' refers to a physical area the same way 'city' does, but it's not true, as we know from places like the former Yugoslavia.

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