Theoretical-Comparative Study Of Three Major Categorical Systems And Its Implications For Practical-Cognitive Study Of Categorization

The word "category" is given two interpretations in the seventh edition of Modern Chinese Dictionary,one of which is a philosophical or theoretical one that category is the generalization as well as the reflection of the universal essence of objective things in human thinking,the other of which being a popular one that category means type or scope.Although both of these two interpretations are not totally unrelated in terms of meaning,there seems to be a great "disparity" between them;for,on the one hand,as the fundamental conceptual fulcrum that every discipline relies on,"category" is obviously required to exist as a categorical system,that is to say,a whole set of "categories" ought to be prepared if a well-knit and sophisticated theory is to be built that will reflect the human cognition of the universal essence of the world objects;on the other hand,"category" in daily use is very casual and unspecified,rendering us an impression that "category can be seen in everything and found everywhere." The reason for the impression,to a large extent,is the fact that every "word" regarded as a mere "expression" is with a "categorical" meaning,that is to say,category is the support for the meaning of the word;yet the fundamental cause of the "disparate" uses of“category”lies in the unusualness of the very concept of "category" itself.First of all,"category" is the core concept that has its place right in the source of Western thoughts and scholarship,which was created by Aristotle,the great master of the ancient Greek academy,and serves as a prominent component of his ideological system.Secondly,the concept of "category" has not been an isolated one since the very beginning;it has been an existence that entails a system which consists of ten well-known categories.Thirdly,the concept of "category" has been widely used since the time of Aristotle,and it has appeared in different philosophical systems of different philosophers;as a result,it has gained very rich connotations and its original significance has thus been constantly "generalized",even beyond the philosophical area and found its place in various other fields like science,and especially in modern context,it has almost become the equivalent of "type".Finally and most importantly,despite the evolution that it has experienced,the concept of "category" has always been fundamentally and closely related to human cognition,that is,it is not just related to the cognition of some objects,some varieties,or some aspects of the world,but to the cognition and understanding of all objects,all varieties,and all aspects of the world.In light of this,we in this dissertation set upon ourselves two interrelated tasks.The first,which may be called “the theoretical-comparative study of the three major category systems”,serves as the main body of this dissertation and will cover the former four parts of it;the second,which is the implication of the very theoretical-comparative study upon the practical-cognitive study of categorization,serves as the necessary extension and will be carried out in the fifth part of this dissertation.In the first task,the dissertation intends to track the evolution of categorical systems,and for this purpose,we divide the development of category theory into three stages,namely the ancient,the early modern and the modern stage,and select the most influential categorical system of philosophical epistemology in each stage for our theoretical-comparative study,which is to specifically select Aristotle ’ s empirical categorical system that represents the ancient theories of category,Kant’s transcendental categorical system that represents the early modern theories of category,and Husserl’s eidetic categorical system that represents the modern theories of category.Through comprehensive and systematic research,we discover that although these three most representative categorical systems may be viewed as heterogeneous to each other,all of them focus on the description of all of our basic cognitive patterns and name theses cognitive patterns “category”,and therefore it is safe to conclude that they come down in one continuous line in terms of the tracking of basic cognitive meanings.As for the detailed argumentation,the dissertation highlights the systemic pureness and completeness of each categorical system as well as the original perspective of each system in terms of the basic cognitive description;it also makes horizontal comparisons between the three categorical systems,disclosing the heterogeneity and completeness of each system while pointing out the inherent coherence in terms of the category theory itself as well as in the course of the development or evolution of the three categorical systems.Afterwards the dissertation further investigates the evolution of the concept ofcategory itself,which discloses the main stream of evolution along three axes,the explicit logical axis,the explicit regional axis and the implicit meaning axis,thus extracting the unchanged conceptual core,"the substratum of cognitive meaning" or rather "the cognitive possibility itself" from the explored evolution of the concept of category itself.Based on this unchanged core of the concept of category itself,we then change to the second task concerning the study of categorization which is fundamentally rooted in "the cognitive possibility itself" within the basic cognitive domain as a kind of act of consciousness called actualization(concerning cognitive possibility)or objectification(concerning cognitive objects)occurring in the whole empirical cognitive process.The whole empirical cognitive process is divided into three stages of constitution of objects by Husserl,i.e.,the stage of constitution of receptive objects,the stage of constitution of intellectual objects,and the stage of constitution of universal objects,which can also be interpreted as three phases of categorization according to our definition of categorization.In the practical study of categorization concerning the process of empirical cognition,we further discover the natural complementarity and inherent coherence between the categories of the three categorical systems in guiding the categorization of different phases in the empirical cognitive process,which can be detected in the facts that the first-phase categorization is mainly categorical schematization guided by the Kant ’ s phenomenological categories(necessarily supplemented by certain degrees of specification of category),and the second-phase categorization is categorical logicalization guided by Husserl’s logical categories while the third-phase categorization is the categorical typologicalization guided by Aristotle’s typological categories,and hence these three phases of categorizations constitute the whole framework of empirical cognition within the basic cognitive domain.Besides the above basic domain,our study of empirical cognition has to be and can be easily extended to other two domains,the psychological domain and the linguistic domain,which are actually more explicit and outstanding in our empirical cognition.However,the so-called categorizations in these two domains are in fact the externalized representations of the categorization inherently within the basic cognitive domain,which are,respectively,the "intuitiveappearance" in the psychological domain and the "systematic expression" in the linguistic domain.