Categorical Thinking Can Be a Curse: 03-19-2025

1. Duality and categorical thinking are father and son.
2. Categorical thinking cannot deal with nuance or variation but only either/or.
3. Categorical thinking is based on dualism, such that invoking any category automatically invokes its opposite category.
4. Categorical thinking is necessarily limited by the categories used, so in many fields, adding new categories is considered an advancement or a revolution.
5. Categorical thinking is useful for catalogs, classification systems, databases, directories, filing systems, identification, memory, organizing, sorting, and storage. However, it must be recognized as imposing limitations on exploration and recognition and encouraging the semantic error of regarding the categorized as the category.