Supercategories And Subcategories

Some people have a difficult time identifying supercategories and their subcategories, the former being a category containing other subsets and the latter being one of the subsets.  Familiarity with words like supercategory or the lack thereof is not the problem.  Irrationalistic denial or misunderstanding of reason and concepts is.  For example, someone might acknowledge misogyny as discrimination, but not misandry, when both are subcategories--which always to some extent accompany each other--of discrimination.  Another person, certainly an irrationalist to some degree like anyone who is inconsistent on sexism like in the aforementioned example, might not realize that theology and science are only subcategories of philosophy, which transcends both.

Every woman is a human, but men are also human, so not every human is a woman.  Human is the supercategory here.  All whales are cetaceans, but not all cetaceans are whales (there are also dolphins and porpoises), and while blue whales are whales, not all of the latter are the former.  There are multiple levels to the supercategory-subcategory relationships in taxonomy.  Lobsters and crustaceans have the same relationship as whales and broader cetaceans, as would crabs and crustaceans and ants and insects.  In turn, snow crabs and crabs have the same relation as blue whales and whales.  Grasshoppers, moreover, are but one of the millions of reported types of insects, and grasshoppers of a particular kind would not encompass the whole of the general subgroup.

Taxonomy is far from the only category where these types of subcategories are present.  All things besides reason are still governed by logical axioms and what follows from them, but the laws of logic are not everything that exists, and not all truths are, in a sense, strictly necessary truths, since everything from the subjective personalities of individuals to the circumstances of historical conflicts are contingent on one of many possibilities, and thus things that did not have to specifically be true, being realized.  A purple wall could have been black, to give a less abstract example.  A car model launched in 2018 could have been released in 2019 instead.  All truths are true; only logically necessary truths could not have been any other way.

Logic is inherently true, and taxonomy is at least connected with many outwardly observable traits of creatures, but what of things that are unverifiable and unfalsifiable given human limitations?  It is very unlikely that the pseudo-gods and pseudo-goddesses of ancient Greek philosophy exist, yet Athena is an Olympian, but not all Olympians are Athena; she is only one of more than 10.  Ultimately, the necessary truths of how supercategories can contain subcategories is still the case even here and with all similar matters.  Any category could only exist on the level of concepts governed by logic, concepts themselves being functions of what is logically necessary, possible, or impossible, and still a subcategory could only be within a supercategory.

Since a supercategory contains a smaller category, and that category could also contain a smaller category, there could be a supercategory within a supercategory.  A group that contains other groups could itself be a subset of a broader group.  To an extent, at least functionally living as if this is not true is almost impossible, but few appear to ever deeply reflect on this and the many possible examples of the relations between categories of varying sizes, and especially not as rationalists with true knowledge of reason.  It is not words or exposure, by direct sensory experience or by hearsay, to concrete categories of something like animals that makes someone in the right on these issues.  No, only alignment with reason can grant them that status.