We are driven by a restless curiosity. We have an inborn need to categorize, determine the relative significance of things and generally make meaning out of our experiences . Much of thinking seems to involve the active generation and evaluation of virtual conjectures. We select those projections that, in a self-evident way, most correspond to a useful and coherent picture of the world.

 THE URGE TO GENERALIZE…

We discern both the particular and the general. An innate proclivity for abstraction and universals is embedded inextricably in language and seemingly in the undersurface machinations of cognition. We bring virtual order out of real world disorder, by naming and describing the items that pique our interest.

Our simplifications, stereotypes and models of understanding are tentative and hypothetical. They are fictional guideposts. Their function is to explain aspects of the world. They should not be reified and somehow confused, or merged, with the real phenomena that they pretend to describe.