What is cognitive categorization?

Cognitive categorization is a concept in personal epistemology: How you sort things shows what dimensions matter to you.

Example: Two engineers classify the same codebase incident. One files it under 'availability' because uptime is the metric their team is measured on. The other files it under 'developer experience' because they believe the root cause was a confusing deployment process. Same event, different categories — and the difference tells you exactly what each person has been trained to care about. The category isn't describing the incident. It's describing the classifier.

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.