The Categories We Use Influence the Way we Think and Act

A Riff Occasioned by Ian Hacking’s Piece in the London Review of Books. ("Making Up People," Vol. 28 No. 16 dated 17 August 2006. Subscription required to read online.)

We categorize things. Our language is constructed to do so. If we have a noun, then we have a category of things to which that noun refers, as the word “chair” refers to the things we categorize as chairs. If we have a verb, then we have a category of actions to which that verb refers, as the verb “to run” refers to the actions we categorize as running. So too, if we have an adjective, then we have a category of things to which that adjective refers, as the adjective “white” refers to the things we categorize as being white.

Our language differentiates the noun categories from the adjective categories. The state of being a chair seems more intrinsic and permanent than that of being white.

I have only studied a few languages, but it seems to me that the link between a word and a class to which that word refers must be universal. I would therefore suppose it is hard wired into our brains.

Hacking in his essay is “interested in classifications of people, in how they affect the people classified, and how the affects on the people in turn change the classifications.” He seems especially interested in biological or medical classifications of people.

He points out that classifications change. Thus “autism” and “multiple personality disorder” are both medical terms of classification that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century. He makes the fascinating observation that there were probably always children we would now call autistic children, but that many psychiatrists believe that there were not people who had what we would now call multiple personality disorder before the psychiatric diagnostic category was created.

He uses also a more popular example. In my younger days, among some people, it was popular to refer to people as “hip” or “square”. Indeed, some people thought of themselves as hip, and acted according to that self-image. I think that very few people think in those terms any more, and I think some aspects of “hip” behavior have pretty much died out.

Some categories carry more information than others. Thus "Downs syndrome" tells one quite a bit about a person with that genetic abnormality, while "African American" tells one much less of medical importance about a person so classified.

For the last couple of hundred years the way people think about categories has changed in the West. (Remember that Bo Derek was a 10!) We count people according to these classifications, and the gathering and analysis of statistics has become a huge undertaking. We define categories of people quantitatively. Thus there are World Health Organization defined borders between the categories of “those of normal weight”, “those who are overweight” and “those who are obese”. We correlate, and find that those who are obese are more likely to have certain health problems than those who are of normal weight.

Hacking points out that, for those of us who have absorbed Western culture, this numerical way of thinking is so ingrained that we tend to assume everyone thinks in this way. This may not be so, and indeed probably is not so.

My first reaction is to wonder how we could ever count the number of people who don’t think quantitatively about people, how we could ever measure the degree of quantification in peoples thinking about people, much less correlate this thinking with any other attributes. See how pervasive quantification is in my thinking!

When we have a category of people, it seems natural (in our Western way of thinking) to wonder about causality. What causes autistic children to be the way they are? What causes people with split personalities to be that way? What causes people to be obese? If we can find a biological reason, or better yet a genetic reason, it affects the way we think about the people involved. I wonder if we would have less homophobia if we knew for sure that homosexuality was caused by hormones during gestation, or was inherent in some people’s genomes?

I suspect that some causal thinking is also hard wired in our brains. Understanding that people who eat a certain kind of plant get sick helps one to avoid eating that plant, and would have had sufficient evolutionary advantage to be selected for. In the past, people often attributed causes to spirits and otherworldly causes. For us Westerners, we seek scientific explanations, and as any reader of this blog would guess, I see that as an advantage.

Knowledge of the categories to which we belong also often affects the way we think about ourselves, and thus the way we act. I am diabetic. Once I was diagnosed, and understood that I have a metabolic disorder that affects the way my cells absorb glucose, I defined myself to include that diagnosis. Similarly, finding that relatives shared certain health problems changed my ideas about myself. Once I thought of myself as a diabetic, I changed my eating and exercise habits, lost weight, began consulting more regularly with my physician, and began a course of prescribed medication.

Hacking also mentions the institutionalization of categories. He notes that autism was once defined as a “medical problem” and thus in the field of competence of medical institutions, but is perhaps being reclassified as a “disability” and thus in the field of competence of other groups that deal with rehabilitation and education for living with disabilities. I think we are now institutionalizing “childhood obesity” as a condition to be dealt with by school systems and families – and the approach is to seek to normalize the child’s weight.

Such “normalization”, or bringing back toward a more typical (“average” or “modish”) value, is also discussed by Hacking. Note that such normalization is probably a good thing for conditions that are correlated with dysfunction, e.g. obesity. It is sometimes applied to conditions for which such correlations are not clear, e.g. being in the WHO category “overweight”. Indeed, it is sometimes applied in ways that seem counterproductive, e.g. ghetto children “normalizing” their scholastically high-performing peers toward the lower scholastic performance that is the ghetto norm.

Finally, Hacking points out that once we have a category applied to people, they can and do form groups and act collectively according to that categorization. Thus there are organizations of people interested in diabetes, and the people in that group lobby collectively (and thereby effectively) for things like stem cell research and fair treatment of diabetics by employers.

Hacking does not extend the discussion into politics or international affairs, but it seems to me that we should do so. It is important, for example, as we think about Iraq to recognize that people there are classified by themselves and by others as Sunni, Shiite, or Kurd. We must also realize that they classify themselves in other ways which we understand even less well, including tribally and factionally. Without understanding the classifications on which people base their actions, it is hard to see how we can predict those actions.

Perhaps the first lesson of international diplomacy and international development is humility, including the recognition of how little we know about others, the categories they use, and the way they think. The natural corollary is that we must give priority to learning about others if we are to interact with them intelligently.

My wife points out that Hacking is a philosopher with an extremely valuable talent and skill – to point out things that are obvious once demonstrated, but which few if any others have previously appreciated. Moreover, as he teaches us about thinking, we can perhaps draw some lessons and learn to think better.