Edgar Morin, who calls for a transdisciplinary way of thinking, wrote an amazing short essay entitled "A New Way of Thinking". (A New Way of Thinking.pdf)  One of the principles of this new way of thinking involves recognizing that wholes and parts are mutually interactive:  "properties emerge from the organization of a whole and may...

I have this feeling that appeals to functional equivalence (or even similarity) are somehow, well, disrespectful, or at least intrinsically misleading.  Functional appeals 'work' because they abstract very specific relations from an otherwise fully real and completely embedded situation, and show how regardless of how those relations come about, if they do, then for the purposes of...