Abstract

A category is at least a way of dividing up the world, whether it is formulated in the object-language, like final cause, or in the meta-language, like individual concept. It is always an anticipation of experience as well, since it provides a pair of pigeonholes that future experience is to be put into. There is no handy way of deciding what degree of generality a predicate must possess in order to be called a "category"; presumably event and cause are categories, but apple and hominoid are not. In any case, it seems that if we make any distinctions at all in the world, they will begin to order themselves in terms of relative generality as soon as we reflect upon them, and those distinctions that appear to cut most deeply across the variety of things will give rise to specifically philosophical questions about their consistency, coherence, clarity, and justification. This is, then, the point at which we divide into schools and programs.