Two problems with the idea that we understand the world using categories.

A problem with the idea of categories is that they may vary from person to person. Whorf says that categories are determined by culture rather than Kant’s idea that they can’t be changed since they are so integral to our experience. An example of Wharf’s argument is language, the Eskimo’s have twenty different words for snow. Another problem that fits in with this argument is that put forward by Quine. He says that if categories are culturally determined then some must be better than others. Categories can be interpreted differently if they do vary between people, this undermines the way we use them to understand the world.

Another problem with categories is their origin. There is quite a lot of disagreement over where they do actually originate. Whorf thinks that categories origin varies according to culture. He used the Hopi Indians as an example. He said that they think about the world in a different way because they talk in a different way. This contrasts with the Orwellian idea that if a police state can control language they can control and restrict thought. This would mean they could also control categories. This means that Categories can be created and would therefore not be universal, which is Kant’s theory. The origin of categories is not certain so how can we be certain that they control how we view the world.

or

The first problem with the idea that we understand the world using categories is that just because we understand our perception of the world using categories, this does not mean that by using categories, we will know the truth about the external world. Kant himself said that we can only know about the phenomenal and not the noumenal and so it is meaningless to talk about the world in relation to categories, because we might not be talking about the real world at all. This is the problem of solipsism and is a problem with the idea that we understand the world using categories.

The second problem with the idea that we understand the world using categories is that categories vary from culture to culture. An example of this is the Hopi Indians. These people come from a culture where they do not have ways of saying ‘past, present and future’ and so they must have a different understanding of time. It is fair to say then that these categories are not universal and only apply to some cultures. This is a weakness of the idea that we understand the world using categories because we cannot be certain that it applies to everyone in the world.

or


One implication of this notion is the lack of consistency in answering the question; where do these categories come from? Kant believed that categories are predicates of experience meaning they are consequently built into the act of having experience. Therefore the categories are a priori knowledge; innate ideas. On the other hand Whorf argued that categories are things we learn, resulting in them differing from culture to culture. Thirdly the novelist George Orwell initiated the idea that categories are structured by language and introduced that if you can’t say it, you can’t think it. This idea was illustrated in his novel ‘1984’ about the totalitarian regime of a Party called Big Brother which decreases the dictionary resulting in a decrease of what you can think.

Another implication is if we do have pre-determined conceptual schemes do they vary from person to person across different cultures or are they universal. Kant believed that categories are universal. He argued that categories are fundamental to all experiences; they have to be in place for an experience to occur. Therefore it doesn’t matter if you don’t know anything about an experience; you will still know it has a temporal and spatial aspect as they are predicates of experience, thus they are not somehow peculiar to human psychology. Whorf argued that our conceptual schemes vary from culture to culture. He believed that if we have different ways of thinking and talking about the world we have fundamentally different experiences of the world.