Knowing, Naming, and Binning

I've been thinking about two cognitive biases that I think everyone has:

1. Naming something is to know it
2. Things come in bins

While it is true that naming a thing, an idea, a concept, etc. is empowering and can be clarifying and is certainly helpful in thinking and communicating, it is not the same thing as knowing it.

By naming things, we are sorting the named objects/concepts into bins automatically:

Are you shy or outgoing?
Is the chemical bond ionic or covalent?
Is your friend dumb or smart?
Is that material a conductor or an insulator?
Are you tall or short?
Is that object paramagnetic, diamagnetic, or nonmagnetic?
Are you fast or slow?

But, and here's the key point, naming and its incumbent binning is only the first step in thinking:

The truth is atoms share electrons in a continuum of ways (whose endpoints look quite different, hence the bins).
The truth is every insulator can be made a conductor under a large enough voltage difference (consider one mile of atmosphere conducting a lightening bolt).
The truth is every object has magnetic attributes (the 'spin' itself of the electron is a magnetic property).

Naming is a great tool, but it can also provide false comfort.

"See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird. You only know something about people; what they call the bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way." - Richard Feynman