"Being never gives itself as such, least of all in fullness, but only by means of different aspects or categories" (Aristotle).
"Thought is necessary in order to understand the empirical, and concepts and categories are necessary as indispensable elements of thought" (Einstein).
The Universal Concepts
The Category Concept
Philosophers have always been in search of the most generic, the most primary, the most universal, the most abstract, the most essential, the most profound concepts, the supreme genera of things, the cognitive roots of reality. These first concepts are called "categories" and constitute the foundation of our understanding of the world.
The problematic of the categories
The subject of categories presents several problematics:
The nature of categories.
The concept of category has historically been linked to the search for the understanding of reality by reducing the complexity of the world (with its apparent chaos and diversity of phenomena), realize the synthesis of the diverse and achieve a unified vision of reality.
The problem is that there are diverse conceptions of categories: supreme genera of things, general ideas of the mind, general linguistic structures, mental forms or patterns, general principles, etc.
Given the close and interdependent relationship between the external world (or sensible, of the phenomena of nature) and the internal world (mental, intellectual, thought, consciousness), it is not clear whether what we are categorizing (classifying) is only the external world or whether we are also categorizing our own internal world as well. This is the problem of category realism, i.e., whether categories (which are concepts and are therefore mental in nature) are as much a part of reality as thoughts, ideas, and the subjective internal world in general.
The problem of the knowledge of categories.
It is the problem of whether supreme concepts are the consequence of the mind's faculty of abstraction of the various concepts (a posteriori categories, obtained empirically) or whether they are a priori categories (existing prior to all experience).
The number of categories.
The traditional view is that there is a finite and determinate number. If there were only one, then we could not differentiate anything in the real world. There must necessarily be several.
The independence of categories.
All categories must be independent of each other. They can be considered as "dimensions" of reality. But, despite being independent, there must be multiple relationships between them.
Completeness.
The set of categories must be complete, that is, they must cover all of reality. Every entity must be described or constructed by means of the categories.
The elicitation of the categories.
The way of "discovering" the categories have been basically three: 1) through the external world (the experience of the sensible world); 2) through the internal world (reason and intuition); 3) by analyzing the structure of natural language as a reflection of the internal and external world.
Once the categories are determined as primary or primitive concepts, the rest of the concepts should be derived or secondary concepts.
The structure of the categories.
Categories are not structured like a language. And categories are not structured as pairs of opposite or dual concepts. A language based on opposite or dual categories would actually be a universal philosophical language.
The Tables of Categories
Different category tables have been suggested throughout history. The most prominent ones are the following:
For Taoist philosophy, the universe is dual. There are 2 universal and complementary principles, which are yin and yang, which manifest as opposite elements: male-female, hot-cold, light-dark, etc.).
For Plato the categories are 5: being, equality, otherness, rest and movement. These categories are reflections of a superior and ideal world.
In his Organon, Aristotle established 10 fundamental categories: substance, quantity, quality, quality, relation, action, passion, place, time, situation and habit. He conceived the categories as subjective reflections of the properties of objective phenomena of the physical world and obtained by a mechanism of supreme generalization. To obtain the categories, Aristotle took as a basis the grammatical categories of the Greek language.
For the Stoics there are only 4 categories: substance, quality, mode and relation.
Plotinus distinguishes between intelligible world (internal) and sensible world (external). The categories of the intelligible world are 5: being, intelligible motion, rest (or stability), identity (or the same), and difference (or the other). The categories of the sensible world (dependent on the intelligible world) are also 5: substance, relation, quantity, quality, and motion.
For Raymond Lull, there are 9 categories (which he called "scalar modes" or "relative principles") that constitute the essence, the inner nature of being and of natural phenomena:
Mode
Scales
Logical
Difference Concordance Opposition
Situational
Principle Mean End
Quantitative
Majority Equal Equality Minority
The term "scalar" refers to the different scales or degrees of reality: from the particular to the general and universal.
Medieval philosophers distinguished between categories of the internal world and the external world. At the internal level, the categories are the "predicaments", which correspond to the Aristotelian table (although with some variations). At the external level, the categories are the "predicables" (attributes of things).
William of Ockham sought maximum economy (applying his razor philosophy), establishing only 3 categories: substance, quality and relation.
Descartes made a dual classification: reality is physical (res extensa, extensive substance) and mental (res cogitans, mental substance).
Leibniz established 5 categories: substance, quantity, quality, relation and action or passion.
For Kant, there are 12 fundamental categories, organized into 4 groups of 3 each:
Group
Categories
Quantity
Unit Plurality Totality
Quality
Reality Negation Limitation
Relationship
Substance Causality Mutual Action
Modality
Possibility- Impossibility
Existence- Non-Existence
Necessity- Contingency
Hegel established the following 9 categories, organized into 3 groups:
Categories.
of Being
of Essence
of Concept
Quality
Existence
Objective Knowledge
Quantity
Phenomenon
Subjective knowledge
Measure
Reality
Idea
Categories of Being: Quality, Quantity, and Measure.
Being is the most universal category. At the same time, it is the most indeterminate category, it has no concrete content, it is the supreme abstraction and is also identified with Nothingness.
Quality is what determines the character of a given reality as distinct from another. Quantity refers to a purely physical aspect. Measure is the unitary link between Quality and Quantity.
Categories of Essence: Existence, Phenomenon and Reality.
Essence refers to itself. Existence is the synthesis of Being and Nothingness. Reality is the union of Essence and Existence.
Categories of the Concept: Objective Knowledge, Subjective Knowledge and Idea.
Concept is the union of Being and Essence. The Idea is the unity between Subjective and Objective Knowledge.
For Peirce, there are only signs and three universal principles (firstness, secondness, thirdness) associated with every process of knowledge.
Gödel believed that correct philosophy should be built on fundamental concepts. He drew up a list of 18 categories: reason, cause, substance, accident, necessity, value, God, cognition, force, time, form, content, matter, life, truth, idea, reality and possibility. These primitive concepts must be grasped through intuition and the relationships between them understood.
For George Spencer-Brown, the creator of "The Laws of Form", there are only two fundamental concepts, which constitute the essence of consciousness: emptiness (which he does not represent with any sign) and "distinction" (which he represents with the sign "¬").
For Umberto Eco, there are 5 fundamental concepts: sign, meaning, metaphor, symbol and code.
The Kantian categories
Kant criticized rationalists such as Leibniz and Descartes for relying exclusively on pure reason. He called them "dogmatic rationalists". He also criticized pure empiricists like Hume (who claimed that all truth is reducible to experience). His philosophy −a theory of knowledge presented in his work "Critique of Pure Reason"−, emphasizes the dyadic relationship between subject (knower) and object (of knowledge):
The categories are the pure concepts of thought, the primary and transcendent concepts of the understanding. They are a priori, innate concepts, i.e., prior to experience, non-empirical. They are mental frameworks within which perceptions (including space and time) acquire meaning. The a priori categories are those that make experience possible.
The categories are associated with the internal world. What is universal and necessary comes from within us, from our own mind, and not from the external real world.
The essence of things (the noúmeno, the thing in itself) cannot be known by reason alone. Reason is insufficient to know the nature of reality.
The external world is responsible only for sensations, for perceptions of phenomena. To make them intelligible, the mind associates them with concepts, thus structuring reality. Concepts have a unifying function. "The function of concepts is to reduce to a unity the multiplicity of sensory impressions."
Space and time are not empirical knowledge, they are intuitions, also a priori, like the categories. They are subjective and are part of our perceptual system.
We must distinguish between form and content. Form is a priori (independent of experience). Content is a posteriori, it proceeds from experience. Forms are the categories, along with space and time. Form is associated with quality and content with quantity.
Thanks to categories we can think (construct judgments) about phenomena. To make a judgment is to categorize or conceptualize. Understanding is the faculty of making judgments by means of concepts.
The "I" is not a category, it is the transcendental unity of consciousness, which realizes the synthesis of the categories.
Kant's theory of knowledge is one of the great landmarks in the history of philosophy. Kant himself claimed that he had accomplished a "Copernican revolution" in philosophy and that his philosophical system was complete: "I venture to assert that not a single metaphysical problem remains unsolved, or without at least the key to its solution having already been provided." Kant's theory of knowledge is one of the great landmarks in the history of philosophy. Before Kant, knowledge was governed by the external world. With Kant, the formula is reversed: the external world is governed by our knowledge; the subject is the metaphysical center. With Kant, contemporary philosophy truly begins. Kant is the modern Aristotle.
The Hegelian categories
Hegel's philosophy is called "absolute idealism":
Reality is not static, it is in continuous transformation and is governed by opposites. Reality manifests itself as dialectic, as a process consisting of three moments: affirmation (thesis), negation (antithesis) and the overcoming of both (synthesis). The synthesis itself, in turn, can be contradicted and overcome.
The categories are "ways of being" correlated with "ways of thinking". There is an absolute identity between the subject (the knower) and the object (the known), between the external and the internal world. Concept (or thought) and reality are the same. Reality exists only because of concepts.
The supreme underlying principle behind the categories, the motor of the concept, is "contradiction", the principle that impels to leave the equality or identity of something with itself in order to establish difference.
As reality is dialectical, the method of knowledge must also be dialectical. With this method one can reach the totality, the absolute, where each particular reality is a "moment" of the whole. The categories, i.e., the forms of being and those of thinking, are moments of the absolute.
Knowledge is totality. Only totality has meaning. The true is the whole.
Kant's categories refer only to the inner world, to the mental world. In Hegel, on the other hand, the categories are absolute, they refer to reality in its totality: to the phenomena (the superficial) and to the noúmenos (the deep, the essence of things), there being absolute identity between the categories of subject (the knower) and object (the known), between external and internal world, between ontology and epistemology.
Peircean categories
Peirce is considered the "Kant of American philosophy". For him, a category is "an element of phenomena of the first rank of generality". He compared categories to chemical elements, for he spoke of a "mental chemistry." In his "On a New List of Categories" (1867) he simplifies the Kantian categories, proposing them as the foundation of a new philosophical-metaphysical system similar to that of Aristotle: the semiotic theory of categories. Semiotics, invented by Peirce, is the general and formal science of signs. According to Peirce, semiotics is the most generic science, the universal science.
According to Peirce's semiotic philosophy:
Reality cannot be conceived of as anything other than mental content. Peirce called any mental content "phenomena" and the science that deals with them "phenomenology". Phenomenology consists in the contemplation of phenomena in order to discern their categories, their most general elements.
The mind only uses signs. Knowledge is always realized through signs. Signification (semiotics) is the basis of our knowledge, both external (perceptual) and internal (intellectual).
Everything that exists and everything that is represented are just signs. For Peirce, a sign is a triadic relation: "something that stands for something to someone in some respect or capacity." That is, something (an object), presents an aspect or quality to someone (an addressee subject). In this sense, Peirce established 3 categories, conditions or "a priori" principles that make all knowledge possible, the most general categories of phenomena, both internal and external (of thought and experience):
Primerity. It corresponds to being, to the original object of knowledge. It is independent of anything else. It is the first, immediate, initial, original, spontaneous, free. It is completely separated from all other reference.
Secundity. It corresponds to the fact, to a quality or aspect that the object presents to someone (the interpreter or cognizing subject). It is relative to something. It refers to an interaction between two elements. It implies dependence, action and reaction, cause and effect.
Tercerity. Corresponds to an effect, communication or representation in the interpreter: the interpreter. The sign creates in the interpreter's mind another sign, which is the interpreter. Thirdness is not the interpreter, but the effect of the sign in the interpreter's mind. Signification is a form of thirdness. Thirdness is the category of that which is mediation between two others, that mediation being an element irreducible to neither of the other two. It is the richest and most complex category, it is generic and it is the nature of thought.
Remarks on the Peircean triad:
In reality Peirce's categories are meta-categories or types of categories. They are not concrete categories. They are at a higher level of abstraction. They are universal principles, the foundation of all knowledge.
Because there is communication between a quality or aspect of an object and an interpreter, all knowledge is really a process.
The relationship between the three categories is dynamic and recursive. The interpreter is a sign and, as such a sign, requires in turn another interpreter, and so on ad infinitum, in a recursive process.
With this triadic conception, the cornerstone of his philosophy, Peirce:
Attempts to overcome Cartesian mind-matter dualism. For Peirce, this universal triadic conception of knowledge is the "Ariadne's thread" of metaphysics.
It radically transforms the traditional Kantian concept of category. The categories cease to be pure concepts of the understanding to become universal principles. It also assigns a new dimension: the representational. It is the linguistic reduction of the mind. For Peirce, our knowledge is linguistic.
It brings a practical dimension to knowledge, because in the triad intervenes representation, formal language.
It seeks the unification and at the same time the linguistic systematization, practical, of the dynamic structure of reality and knowledge. His unified philosophy or doctrine he called "semiotic pragmatism". Peirce inaugurated the pragmatic current of philosophy, along with William James, Schiller and Dewey.
Peirce was an enemy of all foundationalism. Knowledge must begin with experience, with the superficial. All knowledge has an inferential, inductive character. Intuitive, introspective or deep knowledge is not possible, knowledge that does not depend on other knowledge. The method of science is that based on experience, which presupposes an objective external reality. There is nothing that is radically unknowable that cannot be established by applying the scientific method.
Peirce is considered the founder of pragmatism −later named by Peirce "pragmaticism"−, a philosophical school that was born as a logical method (or a logic of science) to clarify concepts. For pragmatism, the meaning of a concept is determined by the practical consequences of that concept. Theories must be linked to experience. The scientific method can be applied to philosophical questions.
The supreme category
In addition to the categories, the idea of the existence of a main, supreme or mother category of all categories is raised. In principle, such a category as such cannot exist, for categories, by their very definition, are irreducible. What can exist is a unifying principle prior to and underlying all that exists and which manifests itself in the first instance as the different categories.
For Plotinus, the One is the principle and foundation of all things and, therefore, of all categories.
For Aristotle, substance (one of the categories) is the most general and deepest essence, the basis of all other categories, thus establishing a two-level ontological hierarchy.
For Kant, the unifying principle is the ability to think, to make judgments.
For Hegel, Being is the most universal notion.
For Peirce, the unifying principle is "interpretation," for it is the basic mode of operation of the mind. Sign is anything that can be interpreted. Interpretation is the categorizing engine, the category-assigning principle.
Addenda
The manifestations of the categories
The notion of category, because of its supreme level of abstraction, manifests itself in all domains. The most prominent are:
Ontology. Categories are the fundamental ways in which being is manifested or expressed. Categories allow us to classify reality.
Metaphysics. Categories allow us to delimit physical reality as opposed to metaphysics and show us the limits of human knowledge. What is not supported by the categories remains beyond the reach of human understanding.
Logic. The categories are the basis of logical thought.
Grammar. Categories are part of the structure of natural language sentences.
Semantics. Categories represent semantic primitives. In natural language, semantic categories are universal, since they are common to all languages.
Mathematics. The so-called "category theory" deals with the description of classes associated with structures.
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