On Categorization
The philosophy of categorization poses unique challenges to the skeptical crowd.
This article is an adapted version of a course paper.
There is an intense, perverse desire in philosophy to critique dogmatism. Kant famously described his first interaction with Hume as so revelatory that the ideas presented “interrupted my dogmatic slumber.” The desire to formally describe various concepts in philosophy—logic, epistemology, and indeed, metaphysics—is rooted in reaction to the failures of a dogmatic paradigm. Dogmatism “teaches us nothing,” Kant argues. The paradigm of anti-dogmatism, however, may lead us into a kind of formal skepticism, an ‘objective metaphysics,’ as it were.
This skepticism is at the core of Michel de Montaigne’s metaphysical project. However, his project is so deeply counterintuitive that it is incorrect. In a sense, Montaigne 'overcorrects’ to the dangers of dogmatism, perhaps so much so that skepticism becomes a form of dogma. In demonstrating this claim, I will use an under-discussed section of Montaigne’s critique of metaphysical anthropocentrism.
Montaigne first begins with a description of the dogmatic status quo: It is naturally presumed that animals are different in kind, or category. Of course, animals and humans have differences. Humans communicate with symbolic language, for instance. Animals do indeed discuss with one another but fail to do so with signs. Indeed, “Humans appear to be the only species to have developed a complex system of signs that interrelate with one another,” argues Grouchy and colleagues, in “On The Evolutionary Origin of Symbolic Communication.” This may not be the only difference between humans and animals but is sufficient for providing a null hypothesis that there is a unique, categorical difference between humans and animals.
Montaigne must then argue that a difference in a type of communication does not entail a categorical difference. Humans and animals have “like faculties,” and thus “in consequence… the same intelligence, the same way we have of working.”
This argument is fascinating, and a somewhat inevitable skeptical response. It seems like the metaphysical difference between symbolic and non-symbolic language is vibes-based. My argument is that metaphysics—especially categorization—relies upon vibes, or intuition.
“Communication” is certainly a category. Montaigne’s “like faculties” argument means that there is no intra-class distinction between symbolic (sign-sign) and iconic (sign-object) communication. Thus, one could conceptualize the various aspects of being into spectrums, with varying degrees of complexity. Suppose there are n categories that compose the being of animals. Montaigne necessarily requires there be a non-n amount of spectrums that compose the being of humans. This view creates an unnecessarily high burden for the anthropocentric hypothesis, for the arguments below.
Colors are composed of green, red, and blue, in varying degrees. There is a ‘pure red,’ a color of red that is exactly all red, and nothing else. This is what that color looks like:
My first challenge, although not a necessary one for my conclusion, is that this color is indeed ‘blue’ by the spectrum account. Red gains coherence through not being blue, that is, it is a referent. 0 is still indeed a number on a spectrum, so this color could be conceptualized as blue.
My second and more pressing challenge is that this metaphysical system leads to absurd, counter-intuitive outcomes. Consider the small visual difference between ‘pure blue’ and ‘blue-and-red on a spectrum blue:’
To my eye, the second color is blue, despite it having some red in the mix. Indeed, I can see essentially no difference between the two colors. But the color is indeed ‘red,’ according to the spectrum account. This is a basic sensory test, but one that cannot be separated from the universal sensory tests we give to all objects we perceive. Simply put, we perceive objects through the senses. There is no object that humans can conceptualize without the senses. Senses thus give a strong prima facie reason to reject Montagne’s claim.
Perhaps this is not enough, though. Intuition-based claims don’t necessarily disprove the metaphysical ‘essence’ of categories. But this burden retreats into a sort of unpersuasive monism. Any form of categorization assumes, a priori, different intuition claims. There is a reason that Montaigne doesn’t compare animals to buildings. We presume that there is a difference between living and non-living objects. The existence of categorization entails that some objects maintain likeness and non-likeness. A monist could say that all things are composed of ‘stuff,’ so categorization is essentially illusory—a tool of our brain to understand the magntiudal differences of “stuff” objects have. This is hard to swallow, although arguing against it is beyond the scope of this article.
To the extent categories do exist, the lines that divide them are subjective. No one has the authority to describe when a color becomes ‘navy,’ although we have a universal sense of doing so. This idea seems to vindicate Kant’s transcendental idealism as a categorization philosophy and critique the skeptical approach of Montagne.