What does classification have to do with knowledge?

Our knowledge is classified. Our brain will attempt to organize everything we perceive in life, sort our knowledge into what we call categories. The act of classification happens all the time: we classify places we are, people we meet, objects with which we interact.

Through our ways of knowing (WOK), we construct our areas of knowledge. When we gain any piece of knowledge, we categorize it and this is what makes life possible.

In real life, if I had to treat every situation I encounter as a new and unknown one, I wouldn’t be able to do 1% of the things I currently do. When I learn a new strategy to solve a math problem, my brain automatically stores it in the mathematics AOK, so the next time I encounter a similar problem, I already know the protocol to solve it. Further than this, we use categorization in a daily basis. When you see people in suits sitting around a table, inside an office’s room, you deduce it is a business meeting so you already know how to proceed. If you had to re-analyze the situation, it would take a longer amount of time. Thus, human beings generalize. Generalization is a fundamental aspect to quickly understand the world around you. Humans crave to categorize things, as a way to simplify the world and keep moving forward in life.

However, this can be a problem. Personally, one of the most challenging intellectual experiences I had until now was to categorize objects without given categories. In TOK, when I had to group objects, I couldn’t accept the idea of not having given groups. There were countless possibilities for the categorization and as my brain tried to complete the demanded task of grouping everything, it simply couldn’t.

Humans tend to progressively get better at categorization, as they acquire life experience and get exposed to more and more situation; the groups inside people’s brain expand. An interesting thought regarding categorization, more specifically, is that people hate when a generalization is broken. This is very similar to the TOK activity. If you have deduced something by looking at the majority, your brain automatically classifies the unlooked as part of the majority. This creates a classification for the certain thing and makes it easier for you to understand the thing. However, if you find a specific case that opposes your categorizing idea, then, you will realize you will need to rethink your entire group. This is why generalization works so well for us, as soon as we classify a piece of knowledge (ex. Observation of majority), we can create a general idea for the group and move on.

Even though no classification system is perfect, it is the only thing that allows us to act the way we do. In school, we solve math problems easily, in the office; the employee knows how to act in a meeting. This is why we always find it harder to do something for the first time. When they talk about being a risk-taker, it really means taking the risk to classify a piece of unknown knowledge.