What is naming categories?

Naming categories is a concept in personal epistemology: When you name and define your categories you can evaluate and improve them.

Example: You manage a task list with hundreds of items. Some are urgent. Some are important but not urgent. Some are neither. You've never written down what 'urgent' means to you — you just feel it. One week, a client email feels urgent. The next week, an identical email doesn't. The inconsistency isn't a mood problem — it's a classification problem. You're sorting by implicit categories that shift with your emotional state. The moment you write down 'urgent = requires response within 4 hours or a commitment is broken,' the category becomes stable, debatable, and improvable. You can now ask: is that threshold right? Should it be 2 hours? 24 hours? You couldn't ask that question before because the category didn't exist as an object.

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.