Truth. Epistemic Ideals and the Psychology of Categorization

Many philosophers, and particularly those of a Kantian stripe, have suspected that claims about the ways the world and its joints are (in contrast to claims about the joints in our models of the world and the way they are) make little sense. Recently, similar views have gained prominence in the philosophy of science and in cognitive psychology. The demise of the strong distinction between theoretical and observational terms over the past two decades is just one, among many, developments in the philosophy of science which is of a piece with such suspicions. Meanwhile, a great deal of recent theoretical work on the psychology of categorization also affirms the fundamentality of our cognitive constructs in structuring human experience.