Formal Categories

Famous quotes containing the words formal and/or categories:

    “It is in the nature of allegory, as opposed to symbolism, to beg the question of absolute reality. The allegorist avails himself of a formal correspondence between “ideas” and “things,” both of which he assumes as given; he need not inquire whether either sphere is “real” or whether, in the final analysis, reality consists in their interaction.”
    —Charles, Jr. Feidelson, U.S. educator, critic. Symbolism and American Literature, ch. 1, University of Chicago Press (1953)

    “The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
    —Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)