Carving up the world

It is said that we carve up the world at its seams.  I doubt that there are any seams.  We carve up the world in ways that are easy enough and that we find useful.  But those requirements — that it be easy enough and that it be useful — underdetermine how the world is to be carved.  So it is a matter of pragmatic decision making.

As we saw in my last post, carving up the world is what gives us the entities that we can talk about and is what allows us to say true things about the world.

I should say at the outset, that carving up the world isn’t an entirely conscious and deliberate activity.  Much of the work is done behind the scenes by our perceptual systems.  So, in part, this post is related to how perception works.  So when I talk about us carving up the world, I am not restricting this to conscious activity.

Why it is hard

We cannot just look around and see what are good ways of carving up the world.  To be able to look around and see, then what you are looking at has to have a lot of detail.  But the detail that we see gets there because of how we carve up the world.  So we cannot presuppose that it is available before we do any carving.

John Wilkins and heretical philosophy

Wow!  Just Wow!

To be clear, I am not accusing Wilkins of heresy.  I’m the heretic.  However, John has new post where much of what he says is where I see philosophy as going wrong.

• 50 words for snow, or conceptual confusion

I’ll note that I haven’t posted much over the last few months.  That’s largely because I am frustrated at my difficulty in communicating my non-standard viewpoint.  Perhaps this will help me make a fresh start.

I’ll quote parts of John’s post where I disagree, then say a little about why I disagree.  I will probably say too little.  Filling in the details can come in future posts.

John uses “conceptual confusion” in the title.  I agree.  But I expect that where I see conceptual confusion is not where John sees it.

Sapir (a student of Boas’) and Whorf (Sapir’s student) proposed a thesis, known obviously as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that our categories determine how we experience the world.

Hmm, that’s not how I understand Sapir-Whorf.

Information systems

As suggested in the previous post, I think of a cognitive system as an information system.  In this post, I want to look at a particular information system, namely a video camera.

Let me be very clear here.  I do not think that a cognitive system is very much like a video camera.  Rather, I see them as very different.  However, by looking at a video camera, we can examine some basic principles that seem to be common to all information systems, including human cognitive systems.

In particular, we want to look at:

• the input phase, where data is gathered;
• the organization phase, where the data is assembled together;
• the output stream — the final output information.

The input phase

For the video camera, the data is gathered into a pixel map.  I am going to describe this as categorization.  That might seem a strange term to use for generating a pixel map, so I should first explain why I am using that term.

Individuals and categories

If I say “there’s a stray dog in our garden,” you will understand “dog” as referring to some member of the dog category, rather than to a particular dog.  Of course, it is referring to the particular dog that is in the garden, but it is only its being in the garden that makes it particular.  We might say that it is a reference to a member of the category of dogs in the garden.

At another time, I might say something that seems to single out a very specific entity, so I might seem to be talking about a particular individual.

In this post, I want to argue that most ordinary language use is really about categories rather than about individuals.  And, moreover, when it seems to be about an individual, it is really about a very small category.

Convention (4) – Biological species

This series of posts on convention originated with my comment to a post by John Wilkins, that I see species as being determined by convention.  See the first post in this series for links.  John disagrees with me, and gave reasons for his objections.  I plan to discuss those objections in the next in this series.  Today’s post will discuss why I take the designation of species to be conventional.

Categorization

Biological classification is an example of categorization.  I take categorization to be a dividing up of the world into manageable parts.  This is often described as “carving the world at the seams.”  However, there aren’t enough seams to account for how we carve up the world.

As an example, consider the dividing of the USA into fifty states.  Some of the state borders are along rivers.  Some are survey lines.  We could perhaps think of rivers as natural diving lines, or seams, except that we often don’t use them even when rivers are available.

Perception – categorization

I have mentioned categorization in earlier posts, suggesting that it is important.  The trouble with the words “category” and “categorization” is that people use them in different and conflicting ways.  And that is perhaps why the importance of categorization is not well appreciated.

Ian, over at his “Irreducible Complexity” blog, has just posted something about categories that illustrates the different ways that categorization is used.

Symbols and categories

In earlier posts, I have preferred the Shannon notion of information, according to which information is a sequence of symbols.  And I have emphasized that symbols are abstract objects.  The symbols are usually considered to be intentional objects, because it is only on account of our intentions that we consider them to be symbols.

In this post, I want to relate the idea of symbol with that of category.  I’ll start by assuming that the readers have at least an informal idea of what we mean by category.