The Analytical Language of John Wilkins

The article can be found here. The main idea can be summed up as

...it is clear that there is no classification of the Universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what the universe is.

I can think of four systems of elements that supposedly categorize all things. Two are from history, the Western classical elements and the Chinese version. One is from a game, and one is something else entirely. There are surely more, as many as imagination allows, and that is the key.

At the end of Maybe Logic, there are exercises. One of them is to gather a bunch of arbitrary objects and divide them into two categories in as many different ways as possible. This is a concrete demonstration of the principle that categories are a mental phenomenon and not a property of the universe-as-such. Thus philosophical attempts to discover the "true nature" of the "real categories" of the objects in the universe are misguided.