It’s possible to use a category, as associated with a word, only for the purpose of establishing joint attention on a referent—a fundamental aspect of communication to be made clear shortly. For example, let’s say that we’re watching a tennis match on television and I want to tell you who I’d prefer to see win. I may say to you: “I’m cheering for the red-haired player.” The fact that the player that I’m cheering for has red hair may have nothing to do with why I’m cheering for them. It may be nothing more than a useful way to contrast that player with the other player, assuming of course that the other player doesn’t also happen to have red hair. In fact, just pointing, without describing anything at all about the player, could be equally useful: “Who do I hope wins? That player 👉.” Either way, there’s joint attention established on the same referent. We both know who I’m referring to.

If I tell you that I’m cheering for the red-haired player, then I use that category (i.e., “red-haired”) in an expendable way. With joint attention established, the category can be forgotten about. But what if I tell you that red-haired people have a higher pain tolerance on average than people of other hair colors? The category “red-haired” is no longer expendable. It becomes core to what I’m trying to say, no longer just a means to an end.

The continuum from maximally concrete to maximally abstract is related to:

1. How narrow the category is vs. how wide it is
2. How easy it is to capture the thought in a moment of imagination vs. how difficult that is

The meaning of the word “apple” is more concrete than the meaning of the word “fruit” because (1) categorically speaking, the former is more narrow than the latter—there are fewer possible-to-imagine sensory complexes deserving of the word “apple” than possible-to-imagine sensory complexes deserving of the word “fruit”—and (2) it takes just a moment of unimaginative thinking in order to visualize an apple, with more effort needed, though of course not all that much effort ultimately, to visualize fruit. An apple is… 🍎. Done. But fruit? 🍎 and 🍊 and 🍌 and… It’s not obvious, at least at first glance, when to stop cycling through sensory complexes before we should be satisfied in making sense of the meaning of that word.

#1 and #2 seem connected, though, in that narrower-category words often seem to be easier to capture in a moment of imagination. “Apple” is narrower-category than “fruit,” and it’s easier to visualize too.

Two definitions:

1. In reductionistic simplification (which is the kind of simplification that comes more naturally to the stereotypically masculine mind), some of the parts of the whole are kept without change or simplification and others are taken away entirely. For example: In the evolution of katakana, 加 was simplified to 力. The left part of the kanji was kept (at 100% resolution), and the right part was taken away (i.e., put to 0% resolution).
2. In holistic simplification (which is the kind of simplification that comes more naturally to the stereotypically feminine mind), none of the parts of the whole are taken away—well, at least fewer of the parts are taken away. Instead, the whole is taken as a whole, and kept as a whole, with the simplification being a matter of decreasing the resolution in an overall way. For example: In the evolution of hiragana, 守 was simplified to す. With enough imagination, squinting at the former can blur it into the latter. That is, “defocusing” blurs the shape into something of lower detail, and then “refocusing,” with stylization added to the result, brings back something sharply focused and aesthetically good, but now with a more manageable amount of detail.