In Categories We Live By, Gregory Murphy argues our constant need to categorize influences everyone and everything from language and law to life and death.
What is the nature of categories? Are they real? Do they exist in nature, or are they made up by people? Does our language determine what categories we have? What are the effects of using categories? (12)
The Sumerians treated all goats as equivalent for the purposes of their accounting—that is, they made a category in which every goat could be represented by the same symbol. (13)
Aristotle’s writing on categories argued that categories are determined by their essence or definition. (16)
Wittgenstein provided a different way of thinking about categories, family resemblance. (18)
A brick is sort of a weapon. Such items are borderline category members. (21)
We cannot use similarity to tell us that the caterpillar and the butterfly are the same kind of thing or that the tadpole and the frog are the same species. (34)
People certainly have strong intuitions that categories from nature are out in the world. Trees, elk, lakes, salmon, iron sulfide, and oxygen surely are categories in nature, independent of human thought, right? (37)
Categories like oaks, suns, rainbow trout, and iron are often called natural kinds. These are the categories that are truly given by nature. They can’t be made or erased by scientists at a conference. (40)
Aren’t trees a natural kind? In fact, trees are a human-made category that refers to woody plants above a certain height. There is no botanical distinction in nature between shrubs and trees. (40)
Vegetables are a culinary category rather than referring to any natural kind of plant. (41)
Biologists often say things like, ‘A species is an interbreeding population.’ (43)
Categories of convenience are based on human activities and goals. If oysters, shrimp, and crabs are likely to go together in our food preparation, it is useful to have a category that includes all of them, even if it bears no relation to biology. (49)
Words are not necessary to knowing categories, but knowing categories is often necessary to using and understanding words. (51)
Cauliflower refers to new snow near a snow gun, and champagne powder strangely refers to snow with very low moisture content. (56)
Ethnobiology compares the categories that people form of the natural world across cultures. (61)
Different cultures do tend to use the categories that biologists tell us exist, especially at the level of the genus. (61)
Where cultures do seem to differ is with higher-level categories that biology has identified, like vertebrates, arthropods, and reptiles. (62)
Many cultures do not have a name for mammals, or even all animals. (62)
For defendants in legal cases, category decisions can mean the difference of years in prison. (80)
Wisdom is often required to make a good classification. (83)
What is not so clear is whether the categories that we have made for different people are real, like schizophrenia, bipolar depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and borderline personality disorder. (85)
Recent editions of the DSM have explicitly embraced the fuzziness of the categories by using what is essentially a prototype description for many categories. (87)
Rather than providing a definition for diagnoses, they used checklists in which a number of common symptoms were listed. Patients would be required to have a certain number of the symptoms to be classified with the disorder. (87)
Mental illness categories are fuzzy—even according to the manual that professions use to classify people. (87)
Those who make the categories control the outcomes. (95)
Anything that isn’t classified and counted can’t be seen. (99)
Categories are made for our convenience, for predicting and understanding things. (110)
A burrito is a sandwich. (117)
Racial categories are a big, fat mess, and not in a good way. They are based on (or are thought to be based on) a lot of different things, like perceptible differences among people, geography, heritage, social identity, genetics, and history. (119)
So we now have this battle of perspectives: race—social construct or biological reality? To avoid any suspense, the answer is social construct. There are no consistent physical distinctions among the various races, and the division of people into five (or however many) races is simply not helpful for biological science. (121)
When thinking of races, our tendency is to think of how different the typical examples of different races are and ignore those within-race differences. (123)
Modern races were a European invention with no particular scientific basis. (123)
There is actually more variation within a single race than between races. (124)
Most natural categories simply do not have a definition or rule that comes close to working. (147)
Almost any way of classifying people comes with some kind of stereotype. (151)
As I work on Natural Information Architecture, I’m sharing notes and quotes from my sources of inspiration and provocation. As always, your questions and suggestions are welcome.