  Our suspicions should increase when we reflect on the Stranger’s practice in the dichotomous divisions in the Sophist and earlier in the Statesman. At the beginning of the Statesman the visitor declares that his search for the statesman will start from the same genus used in the search for the sophist, but he will cut it in a different place (Statesman 258b–c). No one remarks on the fact that in the Sophist the visitor divided the genus art or expertise (technê), whereas now he calls the genus “knowledge” (epistêmê); he blurs the difference further by using the terms technê and epistêmê interchangeably in the Statesman. In the Sophist he cut the genus at step one into productive and acquisitive (later he added separative), and this time cuts it at step one into practical and theoretical. Recall that in the Phaedrus the elder Socrates advises his interlocutor to divide kinds at the natural joints: dividing at the natural joints mattered in that dialogue, because Socrates was classifying kinds in order to sort out an ambiguity between two senses of the word “love” (eros), a vulgar love on the left and a heavenly love on the right (Phaedrus 265e–266b). The Sophist and Statesman use dichotomous division for a different purpose and consequently ignore parts on the left once marked off: the Stranger aims to define a single kind at the bottom of the right-hand branch of a tree. The target (however vague or even misguided the initial conception of it) determines what genus to divide at the start, then a useful first cut and relevant next steps. Different targets (the angler, the sophist, the noble sophist, the statesman) prompt the investigators to carve up kinds in different ways (cf. Ackrill 1970, 384; Cavini 1995, 131; Lane 1998, 34–38), and what counts as an appropriate cut depends on the target of the investigation. We should not expect genuine kinds at intermediate steps on either the left- or right-hand side of the division.