https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_concept
Categorization is a leaky abstraction. Use them when they're useful, and ignore them when they become more trouble than they're worth.
https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...
Leaky abstractions can still be useful but you have to be aware that they're just abstractions and still understand that reality is messy and complicated or you'll end up legislating the value pi.
The planets are different because they were first defined as mystical and cultural concepts, before they could be understood as scientific ones. There are plenty of people who still think about the planets as cultural concepts rather than scientific ones. (What is a Jupiter? It’s a thing in space that our culture has named “Jupiter.”) I think we should define the planets the way co-star does. By listing them:
DATA PLANET = MERCURY | MARS | ETC
Scientists can have their own definitions of things, but they will face resistance if they try to dictate culture through their definitions.
They're all simply human attempts to impose neat category boundaries across a continuum of natural phenomena that are definitely not neat.
Categories can be useful, but they often lead to pointless arguments by lay people (a la Pluto's relegation) when we start to fetishize a human-created category structure as an essential expression of underlying reality. It's just plain old human narcissism.
Pluto is a "planet" in the same way the sun is "not a star". If you tell someone to draw some stars you'll be confused if they just draw a few massive orbs of fire rather than some bright dots.
Before publishers discovered outrage bait as a way to sell ads, "actually Pluto is a dwarf planet not a planet" would have been an irrelevant nerdy factoid but now it's presented as a cultural issue everyone needs to have an opinion on.
So I propose just giving scientists migraines instead and discussing whether the sun and moon should be considered planets or stars.
The planets formed as cultural concepts in the sense that they were absolutely divorced from tangible experience other than in their role as mere “wandering stars,” allowing them to exist as pure symbolic archetypes. The idea of Mars bringing war has little to do with the fact that it and related objects have cleared their neighborhoods.
There’s a distinction here between the planets, which are the symbols that can be enumerated, and a planet, which is what the categorization problem for scientists involves.