Gardner (1970: 227):
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.
On this model, the perceivable[1] world isn’t labelled for categories, but it is of survival value to organisms to categorise the world in some ways rather than others. The perceivable world favours (selects) some ways of categorising over others, varying for species, but it does not follow from this that it contains categories independent of a categorising process.
The contexts in which organisms are embedded are categorisable; they are recognition potential. From the perspective of categorisation, such domains are potential: they have, for example, the potential to kill, to end the categorising. They are a flux of varying probability.
Categorising arises from interactions between, on the one hand, domains that can be categorised, that involve difference (information), and on the other, systems that can categorise.[2] Domains that can be categorised are differentiable: they have the potential to be differentiated by a categorising system. To experience a perceivable context is to differentiate it. The perceivable is both “experienceable”: categorisable and “act-upon-able”, and experienced: categorised and acted-upon.
Footnotes:
[1] Note that using the word phenomenon for ‘a perceivable’ would be confusing here. The (nontechnical) meaning is ‘a fact, occurrence, or circumstance observed or observable’ (Macquarie Dictionary 1992:1329), while Kant distinguishes phenomenon: ‘a thing as it appears to and is constructed by us’, from noumenon ‘a thing in itself’ (ibid).
[2] Strictly speaking, perceiving is an interaction between the universe of difference (in general) being perceived and a part of that difference (perceived by the modeller to be) organised as a categoriser and doing the perceiving.