The Use and Abuse of Categorization

Does language have us, or do we have language?

From birth, we begin discriminating our world through our senses, instinctively seeking out differences and similarities. Yet, long before we assign names to the beings of nature, these beings have already “addressed” us, communicating through a raw, sensory dialogue that precedes any word.

This Monday, we will explore the transition from primordial experience to the acquisition of language and our entry into the “Web of Belief.” We will delve into Quine’s “Scandal,” which suggests that our most cherished concepts—even the idea of “physical objects”—are actually “efficacious myths.” We don’t use these categories because they provide a “God’s eye view” of Truth; we use them because they provide a manageable structure to the overwhelming flux of experience.

We can challenge this reductionist “scandal” through the lens of Natural Inclusion. If Quine’s web represents the boundaries we build to define “this” versus “that,” Natural Inclusion invites us to see these boundaries not as fixed walls, but as fluid, receptive interfaces. We will ask: Is our habit of categorizing an act of survival that ultimately severs us from the natural flow of inclusion?

Finally, we will pivot to the role of language in discriminating within the world and narrative creation—how and why we use words to infer the very nature of reality. Under the theory of Active Inference, perception, learning, and action are viewed as a unified drive to minimize “prediction error” (the gap between expectation and experience).

To bridge these theories, we can ask:

Epistemic Foraging: How does language allow us to “forage” for future certainty, and does this cognitive shortcut inherently sever us from the natural flow of inclusion?

The Utility of Myths: Are we truly minimizing uncertainty through our categories, or are we simply shielding ourselves from complexity by choosing “useful myths” over the inherent ambiguity of nature?

Dynamic Boundaries vs. Interfaces: If our “Web of Belief” protects us, how do we prevent it from blinding us to the fact that we are inseparable from the space we inhabit?