Categories Are Contextual, Reason Is Embodied

[DocWatts]

Hello again fellow actualizers! 

I thought I might share another section of the philosophy book I'm writing which delves into the epistemology of categories, using an analogue of the 'map is not the territory' metaphor.

In it I suggest that reason is inherently embodied, and not a purely intellectual activity - meaning that our reasoning abilities are derived from our concernful involvement with the world.


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CATEGORIES ARE ALWAYS CONTEXTUAL

Orienting Metaphor : 

Categories are like handheld models that help us grasp aspects of Reality that are relevant to us. Just as we wouldn’t confuse a model airplane with an actual aircraft, we shouldn’t confuse our constructed categories for Reality itself.

 The Model Is Not The Manifestation

Throughout our exploratory journey we’ve been assembling a tentative framework for understanding knowledge, grounded in the importance of the living body to what minds are and how thought works. Rather than getting bogged down in a thicket of abstract theorizing that’s disconnected from everyday experience, our aim has been to elucidate our concernful involvement with the day-to-day world. 

From this foundation, we proceeded to highlight the centrality of nonconceptual knowledge for navigating daily life. We suggested that concepts depend upon a background of familiarity with the world that’s nonconceptual, attained through everyday practices and activities. Lastly, we analyzed how this grounding within Reality, termed Being-In-The-World, is foundational for conceptual thinking - including scientific understanding, logical reasoning, and beliefs.

Taken together, the epistemology, or theory of knowledge, we’ve been constructing is called ‘Enactivism’ - named for its overarching premise that minds actively bring forth, or ‘enact’, a lived Reality. A key facet of this framework is that the world itself is central to who and what we are, inseparable from our ‘being’, and no definitive boundary that delineates where ‘I’ end and ‘the world’ begins.

This lack of an absolute boundary between ‘self’ and  ‘world’ may sound like a highly abstract or even spiritual point. However, it has direct applicability for the epistemological ground we’ll be covering in this chapter. The next stop on our exploratory journey brings us to categories, and their influence on our perceptions of the everyday world - how they illuminate, and how they obscure. To that end, we’ll examine everyday dualisms (paired, oppositional categories) such as ‘self and other’ or ‘inside and outside’. We’ll also cover abstract concepts such as ‘space’ and ‘time’, which are fundamental to how we reason about Reality.  

With this requisite groundwork now in place, we turn to our third ‘Provisional Truth’, which is that categories are always contextual. The orienting metaphor that will clue us into its meaning is a handheld model, like a model airplane. The gist of the metaphor is that categories are like handheld models, helping us grasp aspects of Reality that are relevant for us. Just as we wouldn’t confuse a model airplane on our desk for an actual aircraft, we shouldn’t conflate our constructed categories for Reality itself. 

The key takeaway here is that the model is not the manifestation - meaning that models are not a replacement for what they represent. A model vehicle can’t be used as transportation, nor is plastic fruit edible. Moreover, models are not replications of their real-world counterparts - even a highly detailed model can’t hope to replicate the millions of mechanical parts within a Boeing 747. So if a model airplane isn’t a replacement for, or a replication of, an actual aircraft, then what is it? In essence, it’s a collection of curated surface details - such as rigid wings, a cockpit, and an engine - which combine to form a unified impression of a more complex whole. This intuitive connection between a model plane and an actual aircraft is arrived at through imaginative projection that’s derived from our embodied experiences within a world that contains airplanes.

So that’s the ‘model’ side of our orienting metaphor. Now that we have a more precise understanding of what a model is, let’s extrapolate the metaphor to our exploration of categories. The basic parallel is that just as a model plane is not an actual aircraft, our constructed categories are not objective features of Reality. Both model airplanes and mental categories create an intuitive impression of a more complex whole, by emphasizing certain of its selective features. Crucially, these selective features aren’t arbitrary - they stand out to us because they are relevant to us for some reason. This relevancy is derived from our concernful involvement with the world, which arises from everyday practices and activities that we engage with through our living body and our culture.

Consequently, categories aren’t a straightforward ‘retrieval’ of pre-existing distinctions that are ‘out there’ in the world. They are instead an anthropomorphized schema that we impose upon Reality, which helps us make sense of our embodied experience. Recall that a schema is a template for organizing and interpreting information within a given domain. Describing this schema as anthropomorphized indicates that it’s tied to human capacities, needs, and purposes. In sum, categories are functional rather than objective - meaning that they’re useful to us, even though they’re not objective features of Reality.

The basic purpose of a category is to help us make predictive generalizations about what we encounter within the world, which is integral to our ability to reason. Reason is our capacity to manipulate and extend these ‘predictive generalizations’, using them to draw inferences, predict patterns, and reflect upon our embodied experience.

The gist of our ‘Provisional Truth’ is that categories aren’t absolute - they are always tied to a biological, cultural, and personal context. What a context refers to are the background situation and circumstances that inform our interpretation of something. For example, consider how spoken language is informed by tone and body language, and how a conversation’s meaning depends upon its circumstances and our relationship with the speaker. While it’s easy to grasp how the meaning we derive from spoken language depends upon a host of contextual factors, this is also true of the categories that we use to make sense of the world. 

Recognizing that categories are inherently contextual has huge ramifications for how we think about knowledge, but this comes with the potential for misunderstandings as well - so let’s address those right out of the gate. Acknowledging the contextual nature of categories is not to suggest that categories are arbitrary - as we’ll see, there are sensible reasons for why our categorization shifts in different types of contexts. Likewise, the suggestion that categories aren’t objective features of Reality isn’t to imply that categories are purely subjective either (i.e., purely a matter of an individual’s whims and preferences). In fact, the distinction between subjective and objective is a type of everyday dualism that we’ll be scrutinizing in this chapter. Instead, the overall goal is to articulate a more nuanced understanding of categories which seeks to acknowledge their many benefits as well as their limitations.

Edited July 8 by DocWatts