You state "Differences need not be significant to anybody in particular to be significant" as though that were intutively obvious. But it isn't to me. To me, significance is a value judgment, not an absolute. Therefore, it requires somebody to make the decision whether the difference is or is not significant. And that decision depends on the individual making the distinction and the circumstances under which it is made.
For example, you write "The differences between an alligator and a crocodile are fairly trivial, they do not make much difference."
But they make a heck of a lot of difference to the alligator and the crocodile. And they make a lot of difference to the zookeeper who has a female crocodile and wants to buy a male crocodile to breed with it -- an alligator won't do! And it makes a big difference to a hunter -- alligators can be legally hunted, but crocodiles are endangered--shoot one thinking it's an alligator and you could be in for a big fine!
And you write "The difference between a stone and an
amoeba, that is, between inorganic matter and an organism, is large." True in many cases. But to the starving hunter in the wilderness, the difference is irrelevant -- neither is edible, so neither is of any interest, nor is the difference between them. Whereas the difference between an edible mushroom and a poisonous one, which may be trivial to you or me, is of enormous importance to that starving hunter who comes across a patch of potentially edible fungi. |
