The word “circle” does not have an EXCLUSIVE reference to some particular circle. This means that the word does not refer to a particular but to a category of particulars.
The button on my monitor is a particular circle. The CD on my desk is a particular circle. The bottom of my wine barrel is a particular circle. And so on. The word “circle” does not have an EXCLUSIVE reference to any one of these particular circles. For example, it is not true that the button on my monitor is a circle while the CD on my desk and the bottom of my barrel are not circles. They are all circles. This means that the word “circle” refers to ANY of these particular circles. That’s what a category is. A category is something that refers to any particular within some range of particulars.
My point in this thread, or rather one of my points in this thread, is that categories, if they are proper categories, are NOT without a reference to particulars. Categories are merely without an exclusive reference to particulars. Categories, proper categories, refer to any particular within some range of particulars. For example, the word “car” refers to a category that includes both this and this. When I say “includes both” what I mean is that it refers to any of the two images. It does not exclusively refer to one of the two images and it does not exclusively refer to the combination of the two images.
The proposition that my theory is void of categories and that I think that categories are meaningless is simply not true. My theory is merely void of meaningless categories or pseudo-categories by which I mean categories that are all-exclusive i.e. categories that do not refer to any particular either because they explicitly reject all particulars or because they are “hesitant” to refer to any particular. Similarly, I don’t think that categories are meaningless, I merely think that there are categories that are meaningless e.g. the word “perfect circle” as used by James refers to a meaningless category. There are no particular “perfect circles”, not because the environment we live in is void of them, but quite simply because the category “perfect circle” does not refer to any particular thing. Compare that to the word “zombie”. The word “zombie” refers to a category that refers to any of all the possible particular zombies. Not a single one of these zombies is to be found anywhere in the environment we live in, not because the category “zombie” is meaningless, but because the environment we live in is void of what the category “zombie” refers to.
It is possible to conduct an experiment in order to determine what any particular category refers to. For example, you can conduct an experiment in order to determine what the category “circle” refers to. There are many ways to go about it but one way to do it is to choose a subject (e.g. yourself) and a number of images for your subject to separate into a group of those that are associated with the word “circle” and a group of those that are not. At the end of the experiment, you get a set of images that are associated with the word “circle”. By applying the logic of induction to this set, you can measure how much of a circle any given shape is.
The superiority of this approach lies in the fact that it lets you devise a theory on your own. You look at the facts and then make an inference based on them. In the context of this post, it means that you look at the particulars and then derive a category from them. The fact that you discover the category on your own, rather than pick it up from someone else by memorizing its rules, means that you understand it. You know what kind of experience it represents. On the other hand, if you start with dictionary definitions, which are nothing more than crude descriptions of other people’s categories, then it becomes easy to misunderstand the categories they represent. You might not understand what kind of experience the category represents. In fact, you might think that it represents no experience at all. As a consequence, you might become very defensive of the idea that categories do not have to represent experience.