Aristotle and your data dictionary

Most data governance fights are a two-thousand-year-old argument about whether categories are real.

Marble busts of ancient philosophers lined up in a dimly lit museum

Today's post is about Aristotle.... Stay with me. (As promised.)

Quick disclaimer: I am really not a philosophy expert. Barely an amateur. What follows is the cartoon version of an argument with two thousand years of refinement behind it. Corrections welcome.

Since Plato and Aristotle, philosophers have been arguing about whether categories are real.

Take "building." Is there a real thing called building that every actual building is an example of? Or is it just a word we use for stuff that happens to look similar?

This is the Problem of Universals, and its extreme opposites are two classic answers:

Realism: categories are real. Instances are imperfect copies of them. The Platonic version of "building" exists somewhere, and each real building is more or less a faithful copy.

Nominalism: only individual things are real. Categories are convenient labels we invent to group things that resemble each other. There is no Platonic building. There are buildings.

Two thousand years later, every data dictionary in real estate is written on the realist answer. Class A office. Active deal. Stabilized asset. Multifamily. Each one written as if there is a true Platonic version of the category in the sky, and every record either belongs to it or doesn't.

Then the meeting starts.

  • Is a building in lease-up Class A or not yet?
  • Is a deal still active if the LOI expired but discussions continue?
  • Is an asset stabilized at 92% occupancy if the underwriting assumed 95%?
  • Is a building with twelve residential units above ground-floor retail multifamily, mixed-use, or both?

The answer is always: it depends on who is asking and why.

That is nominalism showing up uninvited. The category was never a real thing in the sky. It was a definition someone wrote down, a set of cases that mostly fit, and a long argument about the edges.

Most data governance fights are really fights between the realist surface of the system and the nominalist reality underneath. The dictionary says the category is fixed. The data says the category is negotiated, every quarter, by humans with stakes in the answer.

The most valuable move a data leader can make is to stop pretending the dictionary settles the question, and start documenting how the edges actually get decided. Edge cases are not exceptions to the rule. They are the rule, recorded honestly.

Aristotle could not solve this. Neither will your data warehouse.

Next week: Wittgenstein on 'family resemblance', and why your category definitions never quite hold. (then I promise I'll be done with philosophy for a while)

First posted on LinkedIn.