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As someone who has lived both primarily outside and primarily inside, my preference for categories, for putting things in boxes, has a direct connection with my willingness to put myself in a box (i.e. a "room" in a "building", box in a box). Likewise, most software/computer interfaces I know are pretty focused on putting things in boxes. For one thing, the screen is a small rectangle, and everything has to fit into a smaller rectangle in that rectangle. Even the title "how we sort the world" implies that categories are the central element and that they can be sorted. Nouns are the "real" thing, and verbs are transitory. However, when you live outside, spend both days and nights without walls to encase you, my perspective flipped. Verbs became the important thing. It doesn't matter what the weather is, there is always weather, what matters is how it is changing. A verb-centric world, where the nouns are always in transition. Look, I like central heating and indoor plumbing. I live in a box these days. But I also remember how it was to live outside walls. |
On one hand, as long as we accept that chaining two compatible verbs produces another verb, it follows that chaining no verbs is the same as chaining a single verb "to remain the same", and now we don't even need nouns, because everywhere we used to have, say, an apple, we can formally use the verb "to remain an apple".
On the other hand, if we're attempting to prove things, and wish to use excluded middle or double negation elimination, it's very convenient to have explicit nouns (for which we can do so safely) rather than having almost everything we do be consequent upon taking care to manipulate only the subset of verbs which involve remaining the same.