Categories and Conflict
How persons and groups possess different hierarchies of categories and how that either connects or separates them
Today I want to talk about categories and hierarchies of categories. My working definition of a category is that of a “group of things or phenomena that are similar to each other in a certain regard.” We could also define them as a set of things or phenomena that share certain properties, but that would lead us down the beaten path of classical categorisation and all the problems that come with it. Don’t worry if that doesn’t ring a bell, I may talk about it on another occasion. The point here is simply that we don’t need a definition that is particularly precise. It is simple. A dog and another dog, and another dog, you call them all dogs, because these concrete things are all dog-like. And there you have it, the category DOG. And also a concrete dog and a concrete cat and all cats and all dogs have something in common. If the commonality that interests us is that they milk-feed their young, well, we put them in the category MAMMAL. You can put commonalities in words, like when you say “things one can eat” instead of FOOD. But you could easily make up your own categories, for which there exists no particular name, for example THINGS I LIKE TO DO FRIDAY EVENINGS. This category contains things that you like to do on your friday evenings, which may be different from what other people do on friday evenings. But all those things you put in there have in common that you like to do them on fridays.1
Now, when we categorise the things and phenomena in the world, we notice there is structure to it. For example, we know that a particular dog is a DOG, but also a MAMMAL. And a particular cat is a CAT, but also a MAMMAL. What we also know is that CATs are not DOGs. So the category MAMMAL somehow includes DOG and CAT. And THING refers to every material thing. A concrete dog as well as a concrete stone are both things. What I want to focus on here is that certain categories are somehow more important than others. The category THING seems to sit more at the root of things than DOG, which is a more important category than CHIHUAHUA. On the other hand, MAMMAL contains more ‘things,’ but seems less real. It is more abstract. You can not imagine a MAMMAL, except when you imagine for example a DOG.2
Although it might be intuitive to think that categories carve nature as its joints, as the famous Platonic metaphor goes, there are interesting examples which are able to show us quickly that this might not be as straightforward as one would think, at least not in the realm of more abstract terms.3 Let’s take the German term WISSENSCHAFT (≈ ‘science’), which includes both BIOLOGIE as well as ANTHROPOLOGIE (‘via’ the intermediate SOZIALWISSENSCHAFTEN (social science)). In the English speaking world this categorisation does not hold. Instead we have the SCIENCEs vs the HUMANITIES. Here BIOLOGY is part of SCIENCE but not part of the HUMANITIES.
Back to you, dear Reader. You have certain things that are more important to you than others. This is the same for everyone. If you work with Traditional Chinese Medicine, you know a lot about different HERBs, whereas for someone like me, those all look too similar to each other to tell them apart. Or some of them actually might be of interest to me, but rather in a culinary way. Take OREGANO, for example. If you are a doctor, MEDICINE is a very important category, and it takes a lot of headspace of yours. If you are a doctor which did never like computers, COMPUTER STUFF is a category you try to steer clear of whenever possible. As a tech person on the other hand, COMPUTER STUFF is probably a very important category to you, and MEDICINE - in your world - might be a subcategory of PERSONAL HEALTH. In fact you only might become interested in medicine if you are not well. And even then you consider it the doctor’s job to select the right medicine for you.
What I am getting at here is that people seem to hold different category hierarchies in their minds. I say hierarchies because not only are the configurations different, by for example how much space different categories might take up in different people’s minds, but because the different sizes (amongst other properties) of categories depend on how much value individual persons assign to each one of them. The value assigned depends on the importance the categories play in people’s lifes. For example if your life depends on distinguishing different plants, or you just happen to be interested in plants, you will end up with many many subcategories of plants, and since you gather so much knowledge about plants, you spend less time (and headspace) with other things. That said, your world consists of things that are of great importance to you, and things that are of lesser importance to you (and things which you don’t know about or don’t care about at all, which are not part of your world). Because those things are all ranked by how important they are to you, you end up with a category hierarchy. And this hierachy is based on your values.4
Now, people get along with some people and don’t get along with other people. With the people you get along with you share some important (to you) part of your category hierarchy. People who have something in common form groups, which - again - share parts of their category hierarchies or, to use some business-speak, are aligned to a certain degree. As the SCIENCE example above showed, (language) communities can also differ in what they think is a correct understanding of (parts or aspects of) the world. That’s why it is said that learning a language gives you access to other ways of thinking. The things said apply to all sorts of communities. In their thinking members of a community are alike other members and at the same time different from non-members.
Whenever people or groups are not aligned they fight each other, with one of two5 general results (and everything in between). The first possible result is that they get closer, which happens by an alignment of their category hierarchies. When my categories become a little bit more like yours and yours a little bit more like mine, understanding grows. This is the outcome of an exchange between parties as it happens in conversations. Those can be heated to the degree of misunderstanding AND depending on what’s at stake. That is important, too. What’s at stake determines the urgency and thus the patience of the parties involved. Mutual exchange often bring benefits after all, but sometimes rapprochement seems impossible and the investment cannot be justified. In fact, parties might even come to the conclusion that the other way to view - to categorise, really - the world is actually harmful. Which is the second possible result. People might judge the gap in mutual understanding as just too wide to bridge and the resources in question as to precious. Then - if things get bad enough - they go to war.
There are only a few sources that almost single-handedly profoundly shaped my thinking on certain topics. One of those was Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander. Seeing categories as analogies ‘clicked’ for me. In fact, I could never unsee it afterwards.
DOG is a basic-level category, as it is called in cognitive science. Humans preferably recognize a DOG instead of a MAMMAL or a CHIHUAHUA.
In fact, it is not only not easy in the abstract realm. “What, If Anything, Is a Zebra?” by Stephen Jay Gould helps building the intuition that it is not clear at all if the world can be neatly carved up into distinct categories which eventually come together like the pieces of a puzze.
For completeness: values may be hierarchically organized themselves and categorisation ‘further down’ may depend on this ranking, because it determines what you spend time with, for example. This is basically Jordan Peterson’s idea of value structures.
Actually there is one more scenario. There are many cases where one group’s ‘interest’ does not intersect or overlap in any meaningful way with that of another group (as in the text where I said “things which you don’t know about or don’t care about at all, which are not part of your world”). Usually in such a case there is not much potential for either conflict or getting closer and I will not further consider it here.