The realisation that the world by itself contains no signs — that there is no connection whatever between things and their names except by way of a mind that finds the tags useful — is by no means a trivial philosophic insight.
“The realisation that the world by itself contains no signs — that there is no connection whatever between things and their names except by way of a mind that finds the tags useful — is by no means a trivial philosophic insight.”
— Gardner (1970: 227)
On this model, the world is not inherently labelled for categorisation. There are no tags written into the fabric of reality. Yet it is of survival value for organisms to categorise the world in particular ways, and not others. The perceivable world exerts selective pressure: it favours some forms of categorisation over others, depending on the species and its ecological niche. But it does not follow from this that categories exist independently of the categorising processes that bring them forth.
The contexts in which organisms are embedded are not already categorised—they are categorisable. They offer recognition potential. From the perspective of categorisation, such domains are potential: they hold the possibility of being differentiated, responded to, even survived. They are not neutral; they are active fields of affordance—structured but indeterminate, a flux of varying probability.
Categorisation arises through the interaction between two systems: one, a domain that can be differentiated (a universe of difference), and the other, a system capable of differentiation (a categoriser). A categorisable domain contains information in the form of difference; it can be acted upon and experienced. To experience a perceivable context is to differentiate it. The perceivable is both that which can be experienced and acted upon, and that which is experienced and acted upon. It is at once potential and instance.
Footnotes:
[1] The term perceivable is preferred here over phenomenon. In everyday usage, phenomenon refers to a fact, occurrence, or circumstance that is observed or observable (Macquarie Dictionary, 1992:1329). However, in Kantian terms, a phenomenon is a thing as it appears to and is constructed by us, in contrast with the noumenon, or thing-in-itself. To avoid these associations, perceivable is used to refer to a domain available for perceptual interaction, but not yet categorised.
[2] More precisely, perception is an interaction between the general universe of difference and a subsystem of that universe—organised (from the modeller’s perspective) as a categoriser—that acts to differentiate it.