[feoren]

I think I see where you're going, but I don't think I've quite made an argument of the form that I am claiming is fallacious. Reality is complicated and it's hard to even speak English without relying on categories at all. The complete rejection of categories is enough of a departure from standard reasoning that I'd have a lot of work to do to show that it actually leads to a non self-contradictory theory. But such an exercise is kind of same kind of pedantry that I'm arguing against: an attempt to apply math to English language and then demand everybody follow your math. It's just not useful to do that. I can't really use philosophical arguments to prove that philosophy is not useful.

[pkeenan11]

“No, we really, genuinely, honestly, do not need any methods of dividing things into categories. We really don't.”

“Reality is complicated and it's hard to even speak English without relying on categories at all.”

So are you modifying your position or am I missing something?

[feoren]

It's similar to this:

Person A: "I am highly critical of society for the following nine reasons..."

Person B: "Curious! You are critical of society, and yet you live in it! Hypocrite much?"

Person A: "Yes I do also need to buy groceries to live."

Person B feels like they gotcha'd Person A, but really, they haven't. Our conversation went like this:

Me: "Categories are stupid and you basically never need them. Stop trying to categorize things."

You: "Curious! You hate categories and yet you used them implicitly in your statement about how bad they are! Hypocrite much?"

Me: "Yes, I do need to speak English for anyone to understand me, and I suppose one could argue that English words are themselves categories."

Almost every exercise in categorizing things or arguing about what category things belong to is pointless. Saying "aha, but you yourself are categorizing arguments as being about or not about categories!" feels like a weak nitpicky gotcha to me.

In fact I think the pointlessness of this very exchange is evidence in my favor.

[pkeenan11]

Alright if you think it’s pointless that’s fine, I would just say that anything necessary for basic communication is clearly useful.

[feoren]

It's not necessary. Nouns-as-categories is a misunderstanding of language; an extremely common mistake that people make when studying language, but never when fluently using language. Half of philosophy is based on (and rendered completely pointless by) this mistake. It's just a case where people's own intuition about how they're using their own language is faulty. Perhaps I should have said "it's difficult to use language without being accused of relying on categories". Ontology came way way later in human thought than natural language did.