kategorizon

Kategorizon is a theoretical construct in cognitive science and linguistics that denotes the boundary within which categories can be formed, stored, and communicated. The term blends category and horizon to express the idea that categorization operates within a moving limit imposed by cognitive and communicative constraints.

The kategorizon of a system—individual, community, or artificial—depends on perceptual discriminability, memory capacity, and the granularity encoded by language. It is shaped by experience, expertise, and cultural practice, and can be influenced by tools such as visual displays, search interfaces, or autonomous classifiers.

The horizon is not fixed. It may expand when learners acquire new distinctions or when a technology affords finer discrimination, but it may also contract under cognitive load or data scarcity, causing coarser categorization.

In linguistics, kategorizon helps explain cross-language variation in color, kinship, and social categories. In education and cognitive ergonomics, it informs the design of curricula and interfaces by aligning category structure with users' categorical horizons. In artificial intelligence, models implicitly carry a kategorizon determined by training data and architecture, affecting generalization and interpretability.

Limitations and debate: Some scholars caution that the concept risks overemphasizing a fixed limit and underestimating the role of dynamic redefinition of categories. Others see it as a useful heuristic for comparing categorization systems.

See also: categorization, perceptual psychology, cognitive load, bounded rationality, taxonomy.