Quotes About Categorization

Le mystère de l'Autre se trouve résolu. L'Autre c'est celui que l'Un désigne comme tel. L'Un c'est celui qui a le pouvoir de distinguer, de dire qui est qui : qui est « Un », faisant partie du « Nous », et qui est « Autre » et n'en fait pas partie ; celui qui a le pouvoir de cataloguer, de classer, bref de nommer. (p. 19)

He concluded that language, specifically the act of naming something with a word, helps categorize.

As language is learned, it alters how we process information. Just as when we learn to identify a face with a name, it alters how we treat a face-it's not just a face, it's my friend Mike-so learning language results in our automatic labeling of objects, actions, sounds, and even more abstract categories like emotions. This labeling categorizes the item and links it to other instances of the category.

Notwithstanding the currency of ideas about 'two Spains' ready to confront each other on 18 July 1936, 'us' and 'them' were categories actively made by the violent experience of the war and did not fully exist prior to it.

When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now -- where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.

Life was already sorting them into categories, whether they liked it or not. All they could do was stare at each other dumbly across the widening gaps.

Science is the systematic classification of experience.

We've progressed well beyond the four humors in the two thousand-odd years since Hippocrates, but we still haven't satisfied the urge to discover ways of sorting people into personalities and types and, in so doing, predict how they might act in specific situations.

Our society is used to judging content by its package and label.

I became interested in structure when I was in graduate school. How is it that the brain perceives structure in a sometimes disorganized and chaotic world? How and why do we categorize things? Why can things be categorized in so many different ways, all of which can seem equally valid?

Comparing and contrasting is a valuable human skill - and not just during high school English exams. Our ability to rank-order things is invaluable in making choices and setting priorities.

Each category is generalized to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all the other categories. When everything is political, nothing is political anymore, the word itself is meaningless. When everything is sexual, nothing is sexual any more, and sex loses its determinants. When everything is aesthetic, nothing is beautiful or ugly any more, and art itself disappears.

It's not being prejudiced," Mom said. "It's a matter of accuracy in labeling.

The world seemed divided into girls with boyfriends and girls without them.

People always try to put a title or a symbol on you. If you work in a bank, you are a banker. For me, they see a co-founder of Facebook.

One thing that I feel very, very strongly is that we talk about Islamic countries, Islamic people, Islamic leaders, as either moderates or extremists. It's almost like there are only two categories of Muslims. And actually, that doesn't show respect. It shows lack of understanding of the diversity of Muslim thought.

The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category.

My closet is pretty organized, I'm proud to say. It's set up by type of clothes and then by color. And then, of course, there's the rotating from spring/summer to fall/winter.

Categorisation of actors has become outdated now.

When people make up their minds about you, they only see you one way, which is the easy way for them.

for Captain Aubrey, as for the rest of brute creation, there were only two kinds of birds, the edible and the inedible.

The world is undergoing a movement toward authoritarianism, Delaney, and this is about order. People think the world is out of control. They want someone to stop the changes. This aligns perfectly with what the Every is doing: feeding the urge to control, to reduce nuance, to categorize, and to assign numbers to anything inherently complex. To simplify. To tell us how it will be. An authoritarian promises these things, too.

I always give names to things

Callimachus divided the scrolls into separate classes, such as poetry, philosophy, and law, and then further subdivided them into a narrower range of subjects or genres.