Relevance and utility of naturalistic empiricism and transcendental phenomenology for the understanding of categorization operations Pertinencia y utilidad del empirismo naturalista y la fenomenología trascendental para la comprensión de las operaciones de categorización

Abstract

This is a thoughtful article on categorization.
The concept of “categorization” is understood
as defined by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
(1999). That is, the ability of organisms
to distinguish or differentiate something from
something else and include this or that within
a category. The aim of the article is to identify
the usefulness of John Dewey’s naturalistic empiricism
and Edmund Husserl’s transcendental
phenomenology to understand categorization
operations. Thus, it is argued that Dewey’s thesis
about the capacity for sensitivity in lower
organisms is still valid and very useful for understanding
categorization operations in living
beings and, in the same way, that Edmund
Husserl’s findings about the processes of emergence
of meaning, in general, and about the
syntheses of the original temporal consciousness
and the syntheses of homogeneity and
heterogeneity, in particular, contribute significantly
to the understanding of categorization
operations in human beings.