Labels can repress as well as emancipate, if there is a general expectation for people to conform to existing categories, and those categories are rigidly defined.
I think labels can be useful when they are used to facilitate communication and understanding. But they can also be used as weapons and to manipulate people who have trouble communicating and understanding. I suspect we're on the same page. :)
What's the point of deducing something if you're not going to do anything with that information?
Beyond that, labels are hard for people to get rid of, even those we assign to ourselves. In the effort to categorise everything we grossly limit the potential of the individual. As Kierkegaard put it; "Once you label me you negate me.".
If labeling has fuzzy boundaries, perhaps it shouldn't have strong implications. If it does, the boundary cases behave chaotically, which is usually not acceptable behaviour. I mean, if the labels have no consequences, what is the point of labeling in the first place?
Organizing everything in the world into neat boxes feels so early 20th century to me. Back when we still thought that human reasoning can be applied to achieve a complete understanding of the world and everything in it. Putting things into boxes is a coping mechanism for the feeling of chaos; people do it because it makes them feel good, not because it actually reflects how things are.
This has been my favourite approach as well. Once you label something, you get discussions about what is and isn't the label. Once you label something, the debate on semantics starts and the discussion of the problem stops.
At the same time, unnamed things exist in a state where you can't even think about them without thinking about what it really is. You don't have a word for it, so you have to use the description.
And that makes it easier to change too, if it doesn't work or when circumstances change.
I'm not saying we label too much per-se, but I think it is important to remember that our minds use labels as a shortcut for understanding the properties of the things we label. Useful, but not always accurate.
I disagree, those labels have many aims, none of which are good and most of which seem to be a form of ending conversations before any meaningful conclusion is reached.
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