Existence

Is similarity a fact of things in the world, or is it an observation made by sentient beings? Take two cats, for example. Is it an objective fact of the world that the two cats are similar (shape, size, biology, etc.)? Or are there, ontologically speaking, just two phenomena (or two portions of the phenomenal world) that we, as conscious beings, perceive as similar and categorize as cats?

Comments

I think it depends on what's meant by 'similarity'. If similarity is just the sharing of properties -- having in common this or that attribute -- then it would seem that any two things are similar. Even Barack Obama and the Battle of Hastings have lots of properties in common: being known to historians, being the subject of books and articles, being distinct from the number 3, being referred to by me in this sentence, and so on. (You might reply that similarity is only the sharing of intrinsic properties, but it isn't always easy to draw a line between intrinsic and extrinsic properties.)

So from the perspective of the world, any two things are similar -- and maybe equally similar, since any two things share infinitely many properties. But almost all of those properties will be uninteresting to us, and that's where we come in. From among those infinitely many properties, we conscious beings focus on just a handful in accordance with our interests. If we restrict ourselves to those interest-relative properties, then two cats will share more properties (and hence will be more similar) than a cat and a color will. But that difference seems dictated by us and not by the world independently of us.

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