The Problem with Categories
A map is not a territory
Conceptually a category is like a container - the category "horse" contains all horses and no cows. I guess all forms of life, especially mobile ones, have the idea of category as a foundation for their perceptual system. Even a paramecium swimming towards food is responding to something it recognizes to be in the food category.
Humans are somewhat more capable than that. We use language and most words stand for one category or another. With the increased capability we encounter a problem that bugs never face. For bugs there is no ambiguity. Ambiguity arises when categories are products of learning, The very fact that we learn categories means that the container is always sort of fuzzy.
Tom Petty once sang of a former girlfriend - "She loves horses, and her boyfriend too" . Tom was singing about a difference in the meaning of the word horses between him and his ex. An ambiguous category.
Quine discussed this ambiguity when he noted that there are generally many explanations for any set of facts. The problem is to find the best explanation. Generally we are pretty good at resolving ambiguity. It's a skill we practice constantly. There is a fly in that ointment though - different people can resolve the ambiguity in different ways. People can put different containers around the same thing.
SNAFU
Not so dire. People do interact in all sorts of ways and their ideas tend to co-evolve. Dawkins and Blackmore discuss this in some detail under the rubric of memes. But that's another story.
Lately I've watched in some horror to see the old boogey man 'communism' raise its ugly head.
We even have a fairly clear understanding of what that means. Communism means State control of everything with no freedom for anyone. Stalin and Brave New World provided examples. Communism is BAD. I think we all agree.
The disagreement is about who to place in that category. Are liberals communists? Are atheists? Was Karl Marx?
The huge irony here is that the right wing has come to embrace 'State control of everything with no freedom for anyone ' . Of course the right wing insists on placing their control of everything into the category labelled Freedom.
Korzybski taught that 'the map is not the territory' To know a territory you have to actually go there and check it out. Looking at a map is a completely different experience. A map can show the location and even slope at a place but can't give the feel of a mountain meadow in bloom.
I find that a lot of controversies come from the misuse of categories. Once we look at what's actually in a container we tend to agree.
For instance, I've seen the present immigration problem coming for a long time. From afar I saw in horror what happens when different cultures mix. Lebanon and North Ireland were prominent in the news 40 years ago. The Palestinian issue today can be traced to the uncontrolled immigration of zionists a generation ago.
But also, for me, especially as a Canadian, it's a problem we can't avoid. We have a huge prosperous and if I may say free, nation. People want to come and we have the room. The problem is how to manage that.
For me the category immigrant means someone who has moved here from another country. It doesn't imply 'the worst of the worst'
What do you think?
I open the floor
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.