“Knowledge rests upon a variety of commonly unexamined foundations. Some of these are metaphors. Many of them are categories. But the categories we apply to our thought or experience are not, as we too often imagine, ‘given’ by the phenomena we experience or examine. They are the result of the purposes for which we approach, avoid, or are indifferent to it. So the categories of phenomena depend not upon ‘what is there’ (which is unknowable, and non-conceptual) but rather upon ‘what we intend to make of it’, and, more precisely, why we intend to make something of it at all. Purposive orientation generates the results of the movements of our minds, actions, speech, understanding, and lives.”

— an anonymous informant