Offensive categories
Different problems need different solutions.
Problem one: You have a five year old daughter and you don’t want her to run into an incoming Porsche.
Problem two: You have a five year old Porsche and its transmission is broken. Same Porsche, different problems.
Of course you are going to use a different description of the car for your daughter than for the mechanic working on the broken transmission of exactly the same car.
The simple and obvious reason for this is that even though the Porsche might be the same, the problems are completely different. This explains the different representations of the same car.
I imagine categories as levels of abstraction. A simple low resolution abstraction category is enough for your five year old daughter. It needs to represent some sort of a sound, have four wheels and be a big box, which is faster than let’s say anything else in her usual environment. The specifics of the transmission are useless for this problem.
On the other hand, on a very concrete level, a high resolution category of the Porsche allows the mechanic to repair certain specific parts of the transmission. The low resolution description of the Porsche would be useless to the mechanic.
So which category is useful? The answer is, it depends on the problem. Both can be useless and both can be useful. The reason why I stress the use is because I want to emphasize the problem solving aspect of different categories.
Different categories serve as different solutions for different problems. Of course the category in the father daughter problem 1 is a simple, low resolution one of a Porsche 911. It doesn’t say anything about the details and complexities of a so called 8-speed Porsche Doppelkupplungs transmission. But that doesn’t mean that the category itself is not useful, or god forbid wrong. It is also by no means a value judgment. The father actually doesn’t care if his simple low resolution categorical abstraction of a Porsche 911 also contains a VW Polo, or worse, a Fiat Multipla – on the contrary, he actually hopes for it, because a five year old can be killed by both.
Even a hardcore Porsche fan would never find this chain of argumentation offensive. And even if he would, to deal with an offended Porsche mechanic is hardly never a good problem to solve. Leave him and solve the important problem. Use an apt category. As simple as it needs to be.
