Categorization

Let us begin with categories. First, categories can be fuzzy; they can have shaded borders. What is a rich person? There are clear "cases, but no absolute income line clearly demar­cates rich from non-rich. There is a gradation. There are no clear boundaries here. One can artificially impose them, of course. But then one could impose them in another way just as well. Consider a moral rule like The rich should help the poor." If person A does not help person B, it is not always clear whether the rule is being violated.

Fuzzy categories like "rich" and "poor" regularly appear in moral rules. One can always draw lines in one way or another—below this line is poor, above that line is rich. But where one draws these lines is a matter of interpretation and discretion, just what a strictly absolute morality cannot tolerate.

Second, categories can be radial, as in the case of a mother. Suppose you have lots of mothers of various kinds. A genetic mother (who donated the egg that formed you). A birth mother (who bore you). Your father's wife at the time of your birth, who raised you. And your father’s second wife, your step-mother. How do you know if you have obeyed the commandment 'Respect thy mother’ Which mother? All of them? Even the egg donor you've never met?

Even the birth mother you haven't seen since you left the womb? Of course the meaning of mother has changed since the time of the commandment. And that is the point. Mean­ings change in this way constantly. Most categories are ra­dial. If the concept undergoing change is part of a moral rule, then the rule is not clear and unequivocal. It will require interpretation. But there are always different possibilities for interpretation. And that makes the rule not strict and un­equivocal. It means the rule defines not one path but many possible ones.

Third, there are prototype effects. Suppose you have a stereotype of athletes as dumb and you are in charge of admissions to a major university. This is, of course, a false stereotype, just as all stereotypes by their very nature are false. Suppose you feel that this places a moral obligation on you not to admit dumb people into the university. Suppose you do, under alumni pressure, admit athletes. Have you violated your self-imposed moral obligation?

The problem is this: Rules contain categories (e.g., dumb people). People usually have stereotypes for thousands of their categories. It is completely normal (though may be not nice) for people to reason in terms of stereotypes. Because different people have different stereotypes, they will under­stand a category differently and reason about it differently. That means that they will understand a moral rule containing that category differently. In short, the fact that people really do reason about categories on the basis of stereotypes vio­lates the condition that the meaning of a rule must be invari­ant from person to person and occasion to occasion. The mind just doesn't work that way.

Incidentally, stereotype-based reasoning is only one form of a much more widespread phenomenon called "prototype-based reasoning." We have seen other examples of proto­type-based reasoning in this book. One type is reasoning in terms of ideal cases, as when one thinks about conservatives or liberals in terms of an ideal model of conservatives or liberals. Another type is reasoning on the basis of demons, or anti-ideals. We have seen plenty of cases of demon-based reasoning throughout this book. Another case is called "salient exemplar" reasoning, where one takes a well-known case to stand for a whole category. This is common throughout political and moral discourse.

Fuzzy categories, radial categories, stereotypes, and other forms of prototype-based reasoning all introduce meaning variability. Radial categories are produced, in large measure, because categories do change over time, and their exten­sions over time are often preserved in radial category struc­ture.