I agree with you within the &#x27;academic&#x27; context, but that doesn&#x27;t address my main issue of whether this same approach can or should be used in a &#x27;broader&#x27; context.<p>Could it be that on societal level creating a separate category like &#x27;racist&#x27; is important and valuable, even if it&#x27;s technically a &#x27;fallacious&#x27; abstraction? We don&#x27;t always have the time to properly get to the bottom of things, assuming all of us are even capable of doing so, so we&#x27;re going to grasp for salient categories anyways.<p>It vaguely reminds me of the discussions here about functional programming versus object-oriented programming. Alongside the heated debate for and against either approach (and the definitions of the &#x27;true&#x27; version of each), there&#x27;s always someone who points out something like &#x27;closures are just a poor man&#x27;s objects&#x27;, and &#x27;objects are just a poor man&#x27;s closures&#x27;.<p>Even if, for the sake of argument, the differences between FP and OP are not as fundamental or clear-cut as they seem, I&#x27;d argue that for me and many others these discussions are very useful. I&#x27;d never get out of my &#x27;OOP box&#x27; to explore FP if it wasn&#x27;t contrasted and put in a whole separate category and given a bunch of tantalizing pros that pull me to investigate.<p>Isn&#x27;t &#x27;truth&#x27; really just another abstraction, but one we cannot (yet) dive into to find the underlying &#x27;truth&#x27;? What I mean is, we stop at a certain point not only because it&#x27;s where we end up at for the time being, but also because it&#x27;s a useful abstraction.<p>And to be clear, I&#x27;m arguing this primarily in the context of the already very murky and messy field of the social sciences &#x2F; psychology, where definitions are a lot less definitive than in physics or mathematics, and where they have a much more immediate effect on society.<p>(honestly, I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;m disagreeing with you, and I&#x27;m sorry if I&#x27;m perhaps not making much sense. I&#x27;m not usually this openly... explorative in my comments here. Your comment(s) just tickled my brain in a good way.)