The Heuristic of Categorization

Not everything we group together, and this was famously pointed out by Wittgenstein, has an essence. All gold things have a set of properties that are essential to being gold. We use this heuristic because it's adaptive. It's not algorithmic because there are many categories that don't have essences. This allows us to generalize and make very good predictions. Yes, I can overgeneralize but I can also undergeneralize. That's also a mistake.