A Conversation in the Senior Common Room (Where Mr Blottisham Attempts to Decide Whether Categories Are “Out There” and Immediately Regrets the Confidence With Which He Begins)
Mr Blottisham is standing by the window, looking at a potted plant as if it is about to confess to a hidden taxonomy. Professor Quillibrace is seated with the calm of someone who has already seen this exact confusion many times, in several disciplines. Miss Elowen Stray is not watching the plant at all; she is watching the conditions under which “plant”, “window”, and “standing” have already been separated.
Mr Blottisham: It seems fairly obvious, really. The world is divided up into kinds. Animals, plants, objects, events. We don’t invent that, do we? We just notice it. Categories are real in the world.
Professor Quillibrace: A confident start. That usually signals a structural misallocation rather than an insight.
Mr Blottisham: I’m just saying—it’s not arbitrary. A cat is not a chair. That division is in the things themselves.
Miss Elowen Stray: Or in the conditions under which “thing”, “cat”, and “chair” become available as distinguishable at all.
Mr Blottisham: That sounds like you’re moving the goalposts into the atmosphere again.
Professor Quillibrace: Not quite. She is objecting to your assumption that classification is an optional overlay on a pre-sorted world. That assumption does a great deal of hidden work.
Mr Blottisham: But surely categories are either real or not real. Either the world is already divided up, or we do it.
Professor Quillibrace: There it is. The familiar binary mistake: discovery versus invention, as if those exhaust the space of possibilities.
Miss Elowen Stray: And as if “category” were a thing that could sit in either the world or the mind, waiting for assignment like misplaced luggage.
Mr Blottisham: Well, what else could it be? If it’s not in the world, we must be imposing it.
Professor Quillibrace: You are treating classification as an object rather than an operation. That is already a misstep.
1. The assumed simplicity of the question
Mr Blottisham: So the question is simple: are categories real in the world?
Professor Quillibrace: It only appears simple because it has already decided what counts as an answer.
Miss Elowen Stray: It asks whether the world comes pre-sliced into kinds, or whether we do the slicing ourselves.
Mr Blottisham: Exactly.
Professor Quillibrace: Exactly is doing rather too much work here.
2. The hidden structure of confidence
Mr Blottisham: That seems fair.
Miss Elowen Stray: It only seems fair because you are already inside it.
3. The misplacement
Professor Quillibrace: The central error is this: you are treating classificatory activity as if it were reporting a pre-existing map.
Mr Blottisham: Isn’t it?
Professor Quillibrace: No. It is producing stability across variation, not discovering etched lines in the world.
Miss Elowen Stray: The world does not arrive pre-labelled. But neither does it arrive undifferentiated. There is structured variation. Classification is what stabilises it into usable distinctions.
Mr Blottisham: So we invent categories?
Professor Quillibrace: That would be the opposite mistake.
4. Relational re-description (with less drama, more structure)
Miss Elowen Stray: Consider this more carefully. Systems encounter structured variation. Some differences recur, some similarities persist under constraint. Construal operates over that patterning and stabilises groupings.
Mr Blottisham: Groupings like “cat” and “chair”.
Miss Elowen Stray: Yes. But those are not pre-existing slots waiting to be filled. They are relational stabilisations that become repeatable.
Professor Quillibrace: A category is not a thing in the world, nor a projection from the mind onto it. It is an achieved regularity in how relational variation is organised and re-accessed.
Mr Blottisham: So where are the categories, then?
Professor Quillibrace: That question still presumes they must be somewhere.
5. Dissolving the question without losing the furniture
Miss Elowen Stray: The problem only arises if you insist on this: categories must either pre-exist classification or be imposed by it.
Mr Blottisham: That is the question, yes.
Professor Quillibrace: And that is why it collapses.
Miss Elowen Stray: Once you stop treating classification as object-attachment, there is no longer a need to locate categories in either domain.
Mr Blottisham: So they’re not real?
Professor Quillibrace: That is still the old binary speaking.
6. Why it still feels obvious
Miss Elowen Stray: It feels obvious because classification works. It stabilises perception, supports prediction, enables coordination.
Mr Blottisham: And because a cat really is a cat.
Professor Quillibrace: Only because you have already inherited a stabilised relational history in which that grouping holds.
Miss Elowen Stray: The success of categories makes them feel ontological. But success is a relational effect, not a metaphysical guarantee.
Closing remark
Professor Quillibrace: “Are categories real in the world?” appears to ask whether classification tracks pre-existing divisions.
Mr Blottisham: And the answer is no?
Professor Quillibrace: The answer is that the question is mis-sited.
Miss Elowen Stray: Under relational analysis, it reveals something more precise: a reification of classificatory operations into objects, combined with a projection of their stability onto ontology, and a false opposition between discovery and invention.
Mr Blottisham: So categories…
Professor Quillibrace: …are not things you find.
Miss Elowen Stray: They are relational stabilisations of structured variation, actualised through construal, and only retrospectively mistaken for features already sitting in the world.
Mr Blottisham: I feel slightly cheated out of a metaphysical map.
Professor Quillibrace: That feeling is itself part of the data.
No comments:
Post a Comment