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This list of "glorious battles" is 100% mythical, but any story that's as big as the story of civilization would have to be mythic. Like most myths, this myth has a point, which will become clear later.

The first battle, "Let's categorize," seems to go to the heart of what it means to be able to communicate abstractly. Much of natural language amounts to invocations of categories. For example, if I say to you, "Run!", what I mean is, "Exhibit a behavior which is an instance of the class of all running behaviors!"

The above list shows a mythic sequence of increasingly sophisticated goals for information management methodologies:

• Let's categorize.
• Let's have better categories. This becomes our new goal when we notice that we need better categories. The ones we have aren't as convenient and/or expressive as we need them to be.
• Let's have a system of categories. Let's be formal. This becomes our new goal when we notice that our categorizations are internally inconsistent. When creating categories, we need to adhere to consistent doctrines. Each inconsistency demonstrates either a need for a doctrine, or a failure to adhere to an existing doctrine.
• Let's have better systems of categories. This becomes our new goal when we notice that our approaches to categorization must change in response to changing requirements. are internally inconsistent.
• Let's have a standard system of categories. This becomes our new goal when we see that many systems already exist, and many more are possible. We cannot afford to defer the benefits of having a lingua franca until the perfect categorization scheme has been devised. It may never happen. In any case, the cost of maintaining such a system should be shared by those who benefit from it.

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