The Collaborative International Dictionary
Category \Cat"e*go*ry\, n.; pl. Categories. [L. categoria, Gr. ?, fr. ? to accuse, affirm, predicate; ? down, against + ? to harrangue, assert, fr. ? assembly.]
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(Logic.) One of the highest classes to which the objects of knowledge or thought can be reduced, and by which they can be arranged in a system; an ultimate or undecomposable conception; a predicament.
The categories or predicaments -- the former a Greek word, the latter its literal translation in the Latin language -- were intended by Aristotle and his followers as an enumeration of all things capable of being named; an enumeration by the summa genera i.e., the most extensive classes into which things could be distributed.
--J. S. Mill. -
Class; also, state, condition, or predicament; as, we are both in the same category.
There is in modern literature a whole class of writers standing within the same category.
--De Quincey.
Wiktionary
n. (plural of category English)
Wikipedia
The Categories ( Greek Κατηγορίαι Katēgoriai; Latin Categoriae) is a text from Aristotle's Organon that enumerates all the possible kinds of things that can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition. They are "perhaps the single most heavily discussed of all Aristotelian notions". The work is brief enough to be divided, not into books as is usual with Aristotle's works, but into fifteen chapters.
The Categories places every object of human apprehension under one of ten categories (known to medieval writers as the Latin term praedicamenta). Aristotle intended them to enumerate everything that can be expressed without composition or structure, thus anything that can be either the subject or the predicate of a proposition.
On May 14, 1867, the 27-year-old Charles Sanders Peirce, who eventually founded Pragmatism, presented a paper entitled "On a New List of Categories" to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among other things, this paper outlined a theory of predication involving three universal categories that Peirce continued to apply in philosophy and elsewhere for the rest of his life. In the categories one will discern, concentrated, the pattern which one finds formed by the three grades of clearness in "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878 foundational paper for pragmatism), and in numerous other three-way distinctions in his work.
Usage examples of "categories".
If so, they would increase the number of the categories, which cannot be.
The concepts of unity, truth, and perfection, therefore, do not supplement the transcendental table of the categories, as if it were imperfect, but they serve only, after the relation of these concepts to objects has been entirely set aside, to bring their employment under general logical rules, for the agreement of knowledge with itself.
For if I were to imagine an understanding, itself intuitive (for instance, a divine understanding, which should not represent to itself given objects, but produce them at once by his representation), the categories would have no meaning with respect to such cognition.
From this it follows that the categories admit of no other employment for the cognition of things, except so far only as these are taken as objects of possible experience.
Thus the categories, though pure forms of thought, receive objective reality, that is, application to objects which can be given to us in intuition, but as phenomena only.
Thus, as all possible perceptions depend on the synthesis of apprehension, and that synthesis itself, that empirical synthesis, depends on the transcendental, and, therefore, on the categories, it follows that all possible perceptions, everything in fact that can come to the empirical consciousness, that is, all phenomena of nature, must, so far as their connection is concerned, be subject to the categories.
Special laws, therefore, as they refer to phenomena which are empirically determined, cannot be completely derived from the categories, although they are all subject to them.
But, in that case, not only would there be no end of such an hypothesis, so that no one could know how far the supposition of predetermined dispositions to future judgments might be carried, but there is this decided objection against that middle course that, by adopting it, the categories would lose that necessity which is essential to them.
The same applies to the other categories, as, for instance, how a thing could be of the same kind as many others, and thus be a quantity.
As, however, such an intuition, namely, an intellectual one, is entirely beyond our faculty of knowledge, the use of the categories also can never reach beyond the limits of the objects of experience.
The unity of consciousness, on which the categories are founded, is mistaken for an intuition of the subject as object, and the category of substance applied to it.
The subject of the categories, therefore, cannot, by thinking them, receive a concept of itself, as an object of the categories.
In that empirical intuition the thinking self would have to look for the conditions under which its logical functions can be employed as categories of substance, cause, etc.
According to them, acts or effects, as following those (moral) laws, would be so determined that they may together with the laws of nature be explained in accordance with the categories of substance and cause.
I am far from allowing the slightest value of validity to such vague speculations, and I hope that the principles of our Analytic have given a sufficient warning against using the categories (as, for instance, that of substance) for any but empirical purposes.