"A decision-procedure is a mechanism for deciding what works and what does not."
Another tell. Modern academia, and thus academics, are never concerned with what works. Or as Dr. Stantz (Dan Ackroyd) put in the original Ghostbusters: I've worked in the private sector - they expect results.
This illustrates how critical theory disappears up its own bum. Of course the capacity to question language and ideology is crucial. But then he foregrounds the usual ideological buzzwords such as eurocentric as though they were transparent and uncontestable. No sense of irony there whatsoever. Or is that simple hypocrisy?
I doubt there is anything simple about the hypocrisy. I suspect some of it is just invisible to the proponents and for the rest, it functions as a loyalty test (“good” people rationalise it away) and expression of dominance (we can stop you publicly noticing it).
Lorenzo, have you read any of the work by Iain McGilchrist? I've read his two 'big books'. I am sufficiently pursuaded by his Hemisphere Hypothesis to use this for the basis of the means by which I see the world. Fundamental to his work is this simple idea, 'Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognise (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is ‘firmed up’ – and brought into being.
What, then, is attention? Is it really just another ‘cognitive function’ of that supposed ‘machine’, the brain? It’s clearly something pretty special if it takes part in the creation of the only world we can know. Is it a thing? Hardly. Is it something we do? Nearer, but not exactly. Perhaps a manner of doing? Or even a manner of being?
The best way I can put it is that it is the manner in which our consciousness is disposed towards whatever else exists. The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences.'
Since the book is 3000 pages on Kindle it quite foolish to try to distill it but just wondering if it's been on your bookshelf.
No, but I have listened to him on YouTube, so I am aware in a general sense of his thesis. And, while it is not so hard to see what consciousness *does*, we really have no idea what it is.
Until I learn of a better answer, for me I consider it an emergent property of our 10^15 synaptic connections, and the neurochemical activity among them and within the rest of the mass of our few pounds of brain matter.
I perceive this view is in sync with your comments about the social being derived from the biological, a concept I heartily endorse.
Have not (yet) read any of McGilchrist, but his name sounds like I have heard it on this or some other Substack within the last year. Perhaps our language is still getting in our way but I have a slightly different take on: "Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognise ... and brought into being.
... It’s clearly something pretty special if it takes part in the creation of the only world we can know."
My view: the world being perceived and attended to is still there (really) and the same as before, unless we explicitly use our "attention" to purposefully alter it somehow. Maybe "attention" is perception augmented with consciousness of some sort. What we "attend" [apprehend?] may be different between us to a minuscule to significant degree, depending on our aims, etc.
Thus all living things end up with a perception and a subset with possibly an "attention" that is "close enough for all practical purposes" where said purpose is the continued survival unto the next generation [with or without significant genetic alternations]. As advanced as human cognition and consciousness is, it is still woefully inadequate to truly "know reality" unless or until we evolve into a species with a vastly wider capability in sampling the electromagnetic spectrum and interpreting the results in a meaningful way.
It is just hard for us to say "we just don't know" when we desire so much to know.
This is slightly off topic but I think really worth becoming familiar with for anyone who found this essay interesting. There is a book titled "Blindsight" by Peter Watts, and a real-life phenomenon with the titular name. It occurs when people have brain damage incapable of perceiving vision but t he visual anatomy still exists - and functions.
The stimuli still reach the brain but are not perceived consciously - but evidence shows that the sufferers can still perceive objects & movements in the impaired space. The implication is that vision works to some degree like reflexive movement in that the body can react to stimuli prior-to or without conscious acknowledgment.
The book's argument is that consciousness may be an unnecessary phenomenon to actually existing and in humans may have evolved it as an epiphenomenon, that is either necessary or actually a barrier to further evolutionary gains. In the story humans finally meet an exospecies who appear to be just like this. To invoke this essay's example of illusions etc being a cost consciousness, such non-conscious-but-intelligent existence would not carry such costs.
At first, I thought it was somewhat rudimentary, but based on the responses where people started juggling words, concepts, perceptions and citations, it’s just right. It provided just a little rope, but not too much for the readers ;-) Otherwise, we might have hung ourselves into philosophy - smelling our own farts, as you or Helen colorfully quipped in the past.
A follow up on the above point: I just watched an interview with Yuval Harari, where he got it absolutely wrong, as philosophers always do. Near the beginning Yuval's 'profound' statement was that consciousness is an ability to suffer. Such non sequitur is a starting point of EA of course. Abstracting biology into a concept is sure way to end up with nonsense, and keep juggling nonsense categories from there on:
> This is also why trying to use Quantum Mechanics—specifically, the collapse of the wave function—to infer something grand about consciousness also falls over. Measurement is an information act that increases the information available, not a conscious perception act.
True. However, the collapse of the wave function isn't quite like an ordinary measurement. Measurement is merely one of the closer things to it in our ordinary experience, which is why it's called that.
Sense data is trivially true: you simply can't explain illusions or physical problems that mess up our perceptions without it.
It's not worth philosophical investigation because it's the default assumption anybody has past a few years of age.
Colour blindness, for instance, relies on a notion of sense data -- that what is perceived is not necessarily the real thing.
Furthermore, science is the most radical in its distinguishing between what we perceive and the thing-in-itself, to borrow a Kantian term. For instance, you can't explain molecules or atoms without assuming that what we experience is not remotely the full picture of how things actually are.
And Kant wrote his Critique of Pure Reason to show why science had to be true. He was contrasting the world of science and ordered perception with anything radically dogmatic. More specifically, he was answering Hume who posited the question: how can we claim causality when all we have is induction?
Kant's answer, in a nutshell, is that we cannot conceive of a world without causality in it. It's so central to our understanding that it's constitutive of the world that we create from the inchoate sense data that we receive via our organs and gets actively reconstituted into causal objects. What we can be sceptical of is the thing-in-itself, the world as it is beyond our conception of the world. And the thing-in-itself, whatever the world is beyond our conception of it, we can't talk of. It's just idle speculation -- for the birds.
And so what you write about, the difference between noumena and phenomena, is a misconception of what Kant meant about phenomena. For Kant, phenomena are ordered conceptions, something that is the result of sense data combining with root human categories, and is the basis upon which science, which demands causality, can work.
Certainly, Kant himself would be a fierce critic of critical constructivism, and it certainly has nothing to do with Kant's philosophy. His major contribution to philosophy is to strong claim that the basis of science and objectivism is human cognition that shapes inchoate sense data -- something humans share as humans.
Kant called philosophy: a mere random groping, and, what is worst of all, a groping among mere concepts. He emphasised grounding concepts in experience and looked to science as the gold standard for truth, where progress was so assured compared to philosophy.
Illusions and mirages are a cost of consciousness. Bacteria perceive.
What happens is people confuse conscious apprehension with perception. You perceive way more than you consciously apprehend. Perception that trips a certain threshold becomes consciously apprehended.
This is the problem with the concept of sense data. It implicitly insists that perception has to be conscious (clearly false) and it packages off a certain subset of the information flows involved in perception, requires consciousness to be involved and thereby lets loose all sorts of florid ontological and epistemic confusions.
Also, Kant was a sufficiently unclear writer that various folk can read different claims into what he wrote. There is a line of argument from Kant that displays various levels of scepticism about our apprehension of reality.
I don't think the concept of sense data says anything about perception having to be conscious according to your meaning of perception. I don't think there would be a single philosopher who would have ever argued that goose bumps, for instance, are a conscious act rather than an autonomous reaction to stimuli. And "stimuli" is what I think you are defining perception as, which is fine, but I prefer using a word like stimuli because it's a much less loaded a term than perception.
Anyway, as far as I can see, the concept of sense data doesn't concern itself with stimuli and how a being reacts to stimuli. The concept of sense data concerns itself with what is consciously apprehended and is not related to perception in the sense of stimuli. And if one does as I do and take the concept of sense data to concern itself solely with what is consciously appehended, it's a completely trivial and everyday theory about how we understand anything.
Of course, believing in sense data does lead to the postmodern notion that we do verify our conceptions of the world with others and in that sense our knowledge is "socially constructed". Radical postmoderns take that "social construction" to mean reality itself can be constructed, which is clearly false. Whereas those of a more humble bent understand that that "social construction" is what ensures our collective intelligence as a species as we implicitly share and cross reference and analyse most of the time just naturally in our everyday actions.
All this ties in with Wittgenstein's magnificent private language argument, which in a nutshell basically argues that the nature of language itself demands verification and is social so that a private language is impossible. Which in turn ties in nicely with Joseph Henrich's work on human intelligence being a distributed social intelligence.
And while Kant was generally unclear, he was very clear about the noumenal. The noumenal is specifically beyond our ken -- "reality" from god's view beyond our senses and cognition, completely outside the scope of human sense reception and conception. The noumenal is not "reality" in the way ordinary people talk of reality that has to do with observable entities. No, that's the phenomenal, and Kant was talking about the noumenal specifically to bracket away idle metaphysical claptrap that cannot by its nature ever be decided one way or another.
But I do like your basic phrasing here: "Of course, believing in [your definition of] sense data does lead to the postmodern notion that we do verify our conceptions of the world with others and in that sense our knowledge is "socially constructed". Radical postmoderns take that "social construction" to mean reality itself can be constructed, which is clearly false. " Our evolved survival as the apex predator is predicated on such social constructions and its related level of cooperation.
I have never read Wittgenstein [I have close to zero net liberal arts education beyond HS] even though I have heard of him. I agree that the core value of language demands social agreement and verification for useful social interactions, but I resist the idea "that a private language is impossible". There are many jargon and specialized terms that a subset cognoscenti use among themselves. At one level these practitioners think in those terms even when not communicating among themselves. Ideas and concepts are held in "words" [including made up words and symbols] and we can still think within our own minds privately. We come up with private language when we innovate or discover/create a new idea. Yes, eventually we may need or desire to share that idea with others but until then we are using our private language.
I think the same applies to your comment on Henrich, in that we have [and can really only have] individual intelligence, but perhaps what he really meant was that human knowledge was socially convey knowledge??
I will leave any feedback about Kant to others more qualified than me. :-)
Perhaps another case where our language gets in our way? I have a slightly different understanding of Lorenzo's post. But I like that you brought up stimuli as a separate aspect of all this: "I prefer using a word like stimuli because it's a much less loaded a term than perception."
I interpret Lorenzo's "perception" to involve both the receipt of a stimulus (energy source - electromagnetic, physical, chemical, etc.] and the response of the receptor cells to supply electrochemical signals to the brain; followed by whatever initial "recognition" the brain makes of that signal. That may or may not be followed with further neuronal activity at either subconscious or conscious levels. For example, I understand that we basically actively "see" only a somewhat centralized portion of our field of view (depending on how we position our head and eyes), and our brain "fills in" the rest of the "observed" field with the information it stored from prior interpretations and observations [milliseconds to years earlier?]. Some of that processing is presumably being done subconsciously.
However, when you say the following, I fear you have misunderstood Lorenzo's point, or his viewpoint, separating "perception" from consciousness:
"Anyway, as far as I can see, the concept of sense data doesn't concern itself with stimuli and how a being reacts to stimuli. The concept of sense data concerns itself with what is consciously apprehended and is not related to perception in the sense of stimuli. And if one does as I do and take the concept of sense data to concern itself solely with what is consciously apprehended, ..."
“There can be some interaction here, as we can “try out” different categories when something is indistinct. But when the category lines up with the information, then it “clicks” into place. The categorisation is being applied to the information we are getting, it is not determining that information, still less the reality that is generating that information.”
What happens when there are several different categories that will “click”? Isn’t education a process of implanting a particular category into someone’s understanding?
I had a friend who once told me that “truth is contextual.” My response was that it is our understanding of truth that is contextual. Blind man, elephant, & all that.
"A decision-procedure is a mechanism for deciding what works and what does not."
Another tell. Modern academia, and thus academics, are never concerned with what works. Or as Dr. Stantz (Dan Ackroyd) put in the original Ghostbusters: I've worked in the private sector - they expect results.
"...what dominant groups of human..."
That's the tell, right there. Slave morality in the service of a revolutionary, courtesy of Nietzsche.
This illustrates how critical theory disappears up its own bum. Of course the capacity to question language and ideology is crucial. But then he foregrounds the usual ideological buzzwords such as eurocentric as though they were transparent and uncontestable. No sense of irony there whatsoever. Or is that simple hypocrisy?
I doubt there is anything simple about the hypocrisy. I suspect some of it is just invisible to the proponents and for the rest, it functions as a loyalty test (“good” people rationalise it away) and expression of dominance (we can stop you publicly noticing it).
Wow… This is a bit over my head, but I get the gist of it. I want more.
I have added an two addenda which hopefully clarify things.
Wouldn’t it have been cool to have had teachers like this?
Lorenzo, have you read any of the work by Iain McGilchrist? I've read his two 'big books'. I am sufficiently pursuaded by his Hemisphere Hypothesis to use this for the basis of the means by which I see the world. Fundamental to his work is this simple idea, 'Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognise (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is ‘firmed up’ – and brought into being.
What, then, is attention? Is it really just another ‘cognitive function’ of that supposed ‘machine’, the brain? It’s clearly something pretty special if it takes part in the creation of the only world we can know. Is it a thing? Hardly. Is it something we do? Nearer, but not exactly. Perhaps a manner of doing? Or even a manner of being?
The best way I can put it is that it is the manner in which our consciousness is disposed towards whatever else exists. The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences.'
Since the book is 3000 pages on Kindle it quite foolish to try to distill it but just wondering if it's been on your bookshelf.
No, but I have listened to him on YouTube, so I am aware in a general sense of his thesis. And, while it is not so hard to see what consciousness *does*, we really have no idea what it is.
"... we really have no idea what it is."
Until I learn of a better answer, for me I consider it an emergent property of our 10^15 synaptic connections, and the neurochemical activity among them and within the rest of the mass of our few pounds of brain matter.
I perceive this view is in sync with your comments about the social being derived from the biological, a concept I heartily endorse.
Have not (yet) read any of McGilchrist, but his name sounds like I have heard it on this or some other Substack within the last year. Perhaps our language is still getting in our way but I have a slightly different take on: "Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognise ... and brought into being.
... It’s clearly something pretty special if it takes part in the creation of the only world we can know."
My view: the world being perceived and attended to is still there (really) and the same as before, unless we explicitly use our "attention" to purposefully alter it somehow. Maybe "attention" is perception augmented with consciousness of some sort. What we "attend" [apprehend?] may be different between us to a minuscule to significant degree, depending on our aims, etc.
Thus all living things end up with a perception and a subset with possibly an "attention" that is "close enough for all practical purposes" where said purpose is the continued survival unto the next generation [with or without significant genetic alternations]. As advanced as human cognition and consciousness is, it is still woefully inadequate to truly "know reality" unless or until we evolve into a species with a vastly wider capability in sampling the electromagnetic spectrum and interpreting the results in a meaningful way.
It is just hard for us to say "we just don't know" when we desire so much to know.
This is slightly off topic but I think really worth becoming familiar with for anyone who found this essay interesting. There is a book titled "Blindsight" by Peter Watts, and a real-life phenomenon with the titular name. It occurs when people have brain damage incapable of perceiving vision but t he visual anatomy still exists - and functions.
The stimuli still reach the brain but are not perceived consciously - but evidence shows that the sufferers can still perceive objects & movements in the impaired space. The implication is that vision works to some degree like reflexive movement in that the body can react to stimuli prior-to or without conscious acknowledgment.
The book's argument is that consciousness may be an unnecessary phenomenon to actually existing and in humans may have evolved it as an epiphenomenon, that is either necessary or actually a barrier to further evolutionary gains. In the story humans finally meet an exospecies who appear to be just like this. To invoke this essay's example of illusions etc being a cost consciousness, such non-conscious-but-intelligent existence would not carry such costs.
At first, I thought it was somewhat rudimentary, but based on the responses where people started juggling words, concepts, perceptions and citations, it’s just right. It provided just a little rope, but not too much for the readers ;-) Otherwise, we might have hung ourselves into philosophy - smelling our own farts, as you or Helen colorfully quipped in the past.
Great post!
A follow up on the above point: I just watched an interview with Yuval Harari, where he got it absolutely wrong, as philosophers always do. Near the beginning Yuval's 'profound' statement was that consciousness is an ability to suffer. Such non sequitur is a starting point of EA of course. Abstracting biology into a concept is sure way to end up with nonsense, and keep juggling nonsense categories from there on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuBLxWowDqI
Lorenzo has it brief and clear. I like Harari interviews and books, but here he huffed deeply.
> This is also why trying to use Quantum Mechanics—specifically, the collapse of the wave function—to infer something grand about consciousness also falls over. Measurement is an information act that increases the information available, not a conscious perception act.
True. However, the collapse of the wave function isn't quite like an ordinary measurement. Measurement is merely one of the closer things to it in our ordinary experience, which is why it's called that.
The foundation of critical thinking is ambivalence. Everything else is bullshit. Thank you for your post and good evening.
Keep the good stuff coming 👌
Sense data is trivially true: you simply can't explain illusions or physical problems that mess up our perceptions without it.
It's not worth philosophical investigation because it's the default assumption anybody has past a few years of age.
Colour blindness, for instance, relies on a notion of sense data -- that what is perceived is not necessarily the real thing.
Furthermore, science is the most radical in its distinguishing between what we perceive and the thing-in-itself, to borrow a Kantian term. For instance, you can't explain molecules or atoms without assuming that what we experience is not remotely the full picture of how things actually are.
And Kant wrote his Critique of Pure Reason to show why science had to be true. He was contrasting the world of science and ordered perception with anything radically dogmatic. More specifically, he was answering Hume who posited the question: how can we claim causality when all we have is induction?
Kant's answer, in a nutshell, is that we cannot conceive of a world without causality in it. It's so central to our understanding that it's constitutive of the world that we create from the inchoate sense data that we receive via our organs and gets actively reconstituted into causal objects. What we can be sceptical of is the thing-in-itself, the world as it is beyond our conception of the world. And the thing-in-itself, whatever the world is beyond our conception of it, we can't talk of. It's just idle speculation -- for the birds.
And so what you write about, the difference between noumena and phenomena, is a misconception of what Kant meant about phenomena. For Kant, phenomena are ordered conceptions, something that is the result of sense data combining with root human categories, and is the basis upon which science, which demands causality, can work.
Certainly, Kant himself would be a fierce critic of critical constructivism, and it certainly has nothing to do with Kant's philosophy. His major contribution to philosophy is to strong claim that the basis of science and objectivism is human cognition that shapes inchoate sense data -- something humans share as humans.
Kant called philosophy: a mere random groping, and, what is worst of all, a groping among mere concepts. He emphasised grounding concepts in experience and looked to science as the gold standard for truth, where progress was so assured compared to philosophy.
Anyway, these are my quick, random scramblings. I wrote something more considered on the topic a while ago in an honours thesis: https://anagrammatically.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/the-thesis-scepticism-and-unattainable-certainty-transcendental-idealism-and-humanised-epistemology/
Illusions and mirages are a cost of consciousness. Bacteria perceive.
What happens is people confuse conscious apprehension with perception. You perceive way more than you consciously apprehend. Perception that trips a certain threshold becomes consciously apprehended.
This is the problem with the concept of sense data. It implicitly insists that perception has to be conscious (clearly false) and it packages off a certain subset of the information flows involved in perception, requires consciousness to be involved and thereby lets loose all sorts of florid ontological and epistemic confusions.
Also, Kant was a sufficiently unclear writer that various folk can read different claims into what he wrote. There is a line of argument from Kant that displays various levels of scepticism about our apprehension of reality.
I don't think the concept of sense data says anything about perception having to be conscious according to your meaning of perception. I don't think there would be a single philosopher who would have ever argued that goose bumps, for instance, are a conscious act rather than an autonomous reaction to stimuli. And "stimuli" is what I think you are defining perception as, which is fine, but I prefer using a word like stimuli because it's a much less loaded a term than perception.
Anyway, as far as I can see, the concept of sense data doesn't concern itself with stimuli and how a being reacts to stimuli. The concept of sense data concerns itself with what is consciously apprehended and is not related to perception in the sense of stimuli. And if one does as I do and take the concept of sense data to concern itself solely with what is consciously appehended, it's a completely trivial and everyday theory about how we understand anything.
Of course, believing in sense data does lead to the postmodern notion that we do verify our conceptions of the world with others and in that sense our knowledge is "socially constructed". Radical postmoderns take that "social construction" to mean reality itself can be constructed, which is clearly false. Whereas those of a more humble bent understand that that "social construction" is what ensures our collective intelligence as a species as we implicitly share and cross reference and analyse most of the time just naturally in our everyday actions.
All this ties in with Wittgenstein's magnificent private language argument, which in a nutshell basically argues that the nature of language itself demands verification and is social so that a private language is impossible. Which in turn ties in nicely with Joseph Henrich's work on human intelligence being a distributed social intelligence.
And while Kant was generally unclear, he was very clear about the noumenal. The noumenal is specifically beyond our ken -- "reality" from god's view beyond our senses and cognition, completely outside the scope of human sense reception and conception. The noumenal is not "reality" in the way ordinary people talk of reality that has to do with observable entities. No, that's the phenomenal, and Kant was talking about the noumenal specifically to bracket away idle metaphysical claptrap that cannot by its nature ever be decided one way or another.
But I do like your basic phrasing here: "Of course, believing in [your definition of] sense data does lead to the postmodern notion that we do verify our conceptions of the world with others and in that sense our knowledge is "socially constructed". Radical postmoderns take that "social construction" to mean reality itself can be constructed, which is clearly false. " Our evolved survival as the apex predator is predicated on such social constructions and its related level of cooperation.
I have never read Wittgenstein [I have close to zero net liberal arts education beyond HS] even though I have heard of him. I agree that the core value of language demands social agreement and verification for useful social interactions, but I resist the idea "that a private language is impossible". There are many jargon and specialized terms that a subset cognoscenti use among themselves. At one level these practitioners think in those terms even when not communicating among themselves. Ideas and concepts are held in "words" [including made up words and symbols] and we can still think within our own minds privately. We come up with private language when we innovate or discover/create a new idea. Yes, eventually we may need or desire to share that idea with others but until then we are using our private language.
I think the same applies to your comment on Henrich, in that we have [and can really only have] individual intelligence, but perhaps what he really meant was that human knowledge was socially convey knowledge??
I will leave any feedback about Kant to others more qualified than me. :-)
Perhaps another case where our language gets in our way? I have a slightly different understanding of Lorenzo's post. But I like that you brought up stimuli as a separate aspect of all this: "I prefer using a word like stimuli because it's a much less loaded a term than perception."
I interpret Lorenzo's "perception" to involve both the receipt of a stimulus (energy source - electromagnetic, physical, chemical, etc.] and the response of the receptor cells to supply electrochemical signals to the brain; followed by whatever initial "recognition" the brain makes of that signal. That may or may not be followed with further neuronal activity at either subconscious or conscious levels. For example, I understand that we basically actively "see" only a somewhat centralized portion of our field of view (depending on how we position our head and eyes), and our brain "fills in" the rest of the "observed" field with the information it stored from prior interpretations and observations [milliseconds to years earlier?]. Some of that processing is presumably being done subconsciously.
However, when you say the following, I fear you have misunderstood Lorenzo's point, or his viewpoint, separating "perception" from consciousness:
"Anyway, as far as I can see, the concept of sense data doesn't concern itself with stimuli and how a being reacts to stimuli. The concept of sense data concerns itself with what is consciously apprehended and is not related to perception in the sense of stimuli. And if one does as I do and take the concept of sense data to concern itself solely with what is consciously apprehended, ..."
“There can be some interaction here, as we can “try out” different categories when something is indistinct. But when the category lines up with the information, then it “clicks” into place. The categorisation is being applied to the information we are getting, it is not determining that information, still less the reality that is generating that information.”
What happens when there are several different categories that will “click”? Isn’t education a process of implanting a particular category into someone’s understanding?
I had a friend who once told me that “truth is contextual.” My response was that it is our understanding of truth that is contextual. Blind man, elephant, & all that.
I am talking about perception much more directly, not abstract categories. “Is that a bird?” “Is that a dog?” And so on.