What is changing categories?

Changing categories is a concept in personal epistemology: Changing how you categorize things is a sign of learning not inconsistency.

Example: A product manager inherits a feature-request tracker with three categories: Bug, Enhancement, and New Feature. For months the team debates whether particular tickets are Enhancements or New Features. Meetings stall. Developers ask 'does it matter?' and quietly start ignoring categories altogether. When she audits the tracker, she finds 40% of tickets have been miscategorized — and the miscategorization correlates with delayed shipping. She does not tighten the definitions. She reclassifies. She replaces the three categories with a two-axis system: Effort (small, medium, large) crossed with User Impact (cosmetic, workflow, blocking). The old categories vanish. The team protests for exactly one sprint, then notices something: decisions happen faster, priorities are clearer, and nobody argues about definitions anymore. The reclassification was not an admission that the old system was wrong from the start. It was a recognition that the team's understanding of what mattered had outgrown the categories available to express it.

This concept is part of Phase 12 (Classification and Typing) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for classification and typing.