What do categories reveal about the mind?

Quite a lot thinks George Lakoff, author of Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind.

That very title, for example, is a grouping of items in an Australian aboriginal language that has coherence and meaning only in that culture.  To us, of course, such a collection is pretty meaningless. But to this particular aboriginal tribe the category is a reality.

More than that Lakoff argues, categories create our reality.

So when did humans first learn to categorize? Aristotle is reckoned to be the first categorizer but Alex Wright in his book Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages argues that primitive taxonomies of the natural world pre–dated Aristotle by thousands of years. And determined his intellectual innovation.
But how did humans get to a position to be able to do this early classification? Just how did they learn to develop this skill?

It’s here that it gets very interesting. Pioneering sociologist Emile Durkheim thought that tribal societies had a deep unconscious need to project their family and kinship structures onto the world. Genealogy, you see, provides the perfect tool for classification.

Durkheim found, also in Australia, that aboriginal tribes categorized their natural world with a mirror system of their own tribal organization. They simply overlaid the family tree structure.

Over time this framework became the mental tool humans used to organise information about the word in order to make sense of it. Categorising was, and is, our foremost meaning–making tool.
Interesting, you might think, but what has this to do with Graphic Organisers and visual thinking?

In a future article I’ll outline what Model Learning has found in schools regarding the lack of insight teachers have of this central role of categorisation in children’s understanding. And how this accounts for the very limited impact of mind mapping in raising achievement in literacy and thinking skills.  Oh, and what to do about it.

References:
Durkheim, E. & Mauss, (1963) Primitive Classification, University of Chicago Press
Lakoff, G. (1987), Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, University of Chicago Press
Wright, A. (2007),  Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, Joseph Henry Press