Tom Hopkins at Usable Interfaces deepens the discussion from categorization to truth. Isn’t truth what’s really at stake, he asks.

Certainly, traditionally the two are tied, since truth was taken to apply to propositions, and the canonical form of  a proposition is X is Y. The Y, one way or another, is likely to be or imply a categorization. We’ve always been happy to say both that Socrates is a human and Socrates is hungry, without thinking there’s a contradiction between those two, because Socrates can have more than attribute (i.e., belong in more than one category). Classically, though, we’ve wanted to be able to assign one category as fundamental, or “essential.” That accords with common sense: Socrates really is a human, whereas his hunger is just a passing attribute of a human. But we took that common sense and over-thought it, saying that each thing must have one and only one essence. Further, we thought those essences had to form a perfect, harmonious, beautiful order that exists independent of our awareness of it. In fact, its existence was taken to be a requirement for us to make sense of the flurry of perceptions, and a requirement for knowledge.

We’ve  been undoing the work of essentialism for a long time now. That has entailed recognizing our human role in letting various true categorizations emerge: We see Socrates as hungry because he’s in our restaurant now, but we see him now as a physical human because he’s in our emergency room. We can be mistaken in our categorizations – Socrates is in our restaurant to use the men’s room and is not hungry at all – but there are so many truths and so many possible categorizations that our projects and interests are far more important to what emerges than are any hoped-for privileged essences.

Tom’s post takes this down a different path, leading to the importance of “testimony,” which is a very fruitful way of proceeding. But, it’s Memorial Day, I’m on dial-up so  I have to post a first draft, and this is it…