Categorical Distinctions
The common or dominant ways to view categories as of the end of the 20th century.
- via bundle theory as bundles of properties - categories reflect differences in these
- via peer-to-peer comparisons or dialectics - categories are formed by conflict/debate
- via value theory as leading to specific ends - categories are formed by choosing ends
- via conceptual metaphors as arising from characteristics of human cognition itself - categories are found via cognitive science and other study of that biological system
Any of these ways can be criticized for...
- for seeking to make distinctions that aren't as universal as claimed (greedy reductionism)
- for serious bias in point of view (subject-object problem or God's eye view)
- for relying on theological or spiritual claims a priori, for relying too much on surface conflict or current investigative priorities to point out differences
- for ignoring action
- for ignoring the perceived or biospheric context, or the cognitive mechanisms that perceive and invent categories
- or for relying on a complex empirical process of investigation that is poorly understood and only recently embarked upon.
In process philosophy, this last is the only possibility, but historically philosophers have been loath to conclude that nothing exists but process.
Read more about this topic: Category Of Being
Famous quotes containing the words categorical and/or distinctions:
“We do the same thing to parents that we do to children. We insist that they are some kind of categorical abstraction because they produced a child. They were people before that, and they’re still people in all other areas of their lives. But when it comes to the state of parenthood they are abruptly heir to a whole collection of virtues and feelings that are assigned to them with a fine arbitrary disregard for individuality.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)