<p>It seems like experience is organised by the abstract concepts or categories that we know - the more we know, the more we perceive. The world is an undifferentiated whole, and we use concepts and categories to make sense of it in a way that seems pre-rational and not necessarily entirely verbal, but for sure to a high degree facilitated by language. Where my daughter sees &quot;a bunch of guitars&quot;, I see one electrical bass, two stratocasters, one telecaster, one semi-hollow ES-335 copy, one acoustic and one classical guitar.</p>
<p>I think most people have the experience that as we learn something new, suddenly we see things in the world that we didn't see before. We have learned a new way of looking at the world, of organising our sensory input into new categories, and we therefore see things that we couldn't see before.</p>
<p>I have no doubt that this phenomenon has been studied extensively in cognitive science, and I would like some references for where I could read more about this. I'm interested in the way that our concepts influence our experience and how this leads to habits that make us take our concepts as truth.</p>
<p>My main purpose is to use such scientific literature to support an argument that diagnostic categories in psychiatry aren't &quot;true&quot; (i.e. natural categories) even if they &quot;feel&quot; true to us clinicians (I work as a psychiatrist), because as least to some extent, they're the result of having been socialised into a certain way of organising our clinical experience.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-10-24T12:32:20.707Z
Check out the [Sapir–Whorf hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity): "... linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories"
Arnon Weinberg
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-10-24T15:36:57.390Z
There is lots of direct literature on your intended purpose - questioning diagnostic categories and attempting better classification to better target treatment. Why not start there instead of going around the long way?
Bryan Krause
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-10-24T15:39:01.760Z
See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters - it's pretty clear there are individual differences in categorization for a given problem, and benefits to each approach.
Bryan Krause
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-10-24T18:59:47.830Z
Armon Weinberg: Thank you. Looks promising, and I'll look into it.

Bryan Krause: Thank you for your input, but I'm quite well read on the topic of the diagnostic system. What I'm after is research around what I perceive to be a kind of cognitive bias among clinicians: "I know the category is true because I observe it" to which I'd like to say that the reason that we observe the category is that we have learned to perceive it in that way, but that doesn't mean that it has any particular truth. And I'd like some research in cognitive science to support this.
JonB
<cognitive-psychology>
Experience organised by concepts - relevant science?
JonB
# Experience organised by concepts - relevant science?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2020-10-24)

It seems like experience is organised by the abstract concepts or categories that we know - the more we know, the more we perceive. The world is an undifferentiated whole, and we use concepts and categories to make sense of it in a way that seems pre-rational and not necessarily entirely verbal, but for sure to a high degree facilitated by language. Where my daughter sees "a bunch of guitars", I see one electrical bass, two stratocasters, one telecaster, one semi-hollow ES-335 copy, one acoustic and one classical guitar.

I think most people have the experience that as we learn something new, suddenly we see things in the world that we didn't see before. We have learned a new way of looking at the world, of organising our sensory input into new categories, and we therefore see things that we couldn't see before.

I have no doubt that this phenomenon has been studied extensively in cognitive science, and I would like some references for where I could read more about this. I'm interested in the way that our concepts influence our experience and how this leads to habits that make us take our concepts as truth.

My main purpose is to use such scientific literature to support an argument that diagnostic categories in psychiatry aren't "true" (i.e. natural categories) even if they "feel" true to us clinicians (I work as a psychiatrist), because as least to some extent, they're the result of having been socialised into a certain way of organising our clinical experience.

**Tags:** cognitive-psychology

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: Check out the [Sapir–Whorf hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity): "... linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories"  
> **username_2**: There is lots of direct literature on your intended purpose - questioning diagnostic categories and attempting better classification to better target treatment. Why not start there instead of going around the long way?  
> **username_2**: See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters - it's pretty clear there are individual differences in categorization for a given problem, and benefits to each approach.  
> **username_0**: Armon Weinberg: Thank you. Looks promising, and I'll look into it.  username_2: Thank you for your input, but I'm quite well read on the topic of the diagnostic system. What I'm after is research around what I perceive to be a kind of cognitive bias among clinicians: "I know the category is true because I observe it" to which I'd like to say that the reason that we observe the category is that we have learned to perceive it in that way, but that doesn't mean that it has any particular truth. And I'd like some research in cognitive science to support this.  

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## 0 answers

