Categories Are Meaningful: Pro-Choice and Pro-Life on Personhood

coberst

Categories Are Meaningful: Pro-Choice and Pro-Life on Personhood

Common sense or, as cognitive science labels it, folk theory informs us that “all things are a kind of thing”. All things have in common with other things certain characteristics; i.e. all things belong in categories with other like things. Things are categorized together based upon what they have in common. It might be worth while to think of category as being a container.

In classical or conventional terms we categorize things in accordance with what are regarded as being that which is essential to that kind of thing. All things that are essentially the same fall into the same category. What is essential to a tree is that which is necessary and sufficient for that thing to be classified as a tree. To categorize a thing, i.e. define a thing, is to give its essential characteristics.

In some way or another all creatures must categorize. At a minimum all creatures must distinguish friend from foe or eat and not eat. Categorization is part of the fundamental needs for survival of the creature. If the mouse mistakes a snake for a stick that mouse becomes toast; the same categorization problem applies to the lion and to the man.

Categorization is meaningful. Meaning is not a thing; something is meaningful for a creature only when there is an association between that thing and the creature. “Meaningfulness derives from the experience of functioning as a being of a certain sort in an environment of a certain sort.” It is meaningful to a soldier when s/he mistakenly categorizes a tank to be only a harmless tree or an enemy to be a friend.

There is nothing more meaningful for a creatures’ survival than correct categorization of the world in which that creature lives.

When does a human female egg fertilized by a human male sperm become a person?

Quotes from “Metaphors We Live By” George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

coberst

Cognitive science has introduced a new way of viewing the world and our self by declaring a new paradigm which I call the embodied mind. The primary focus is upon the fact that there is no mind/body duality but that there is indeed an integrated mind and body. The mind and body are as integrated as is the heart and the body.

The human thought process is dominated by the characteristic of our integrated body. The sensorimotor neural network is an integral part of our mind. The neural network that makes movement and perception possible is the same network that processes our thinking.

The unconscious categories that guide our human response to the world are constructed in the same way as are the categories that make it possible of other animals to survive in the world. We form categories both consciously and unconsciously.

Why do we feel that both our consciously created and unconsciously created categories fit the world?

Our consciously formed concepts fit the world, more or less, because we consciously examine the world with our senses and our reason and classify that world into these concepts we call categories.

Our unconsciously formed categories are a different matter. Our unconsciously formed categories fit our world because these basic-level categories “have evolved to form at least one important class of categories that optimally fit our bodily experiences of entities and certain extremely important differences in the natural environment”.