Categorization is not neutral. When you label something — a user segment, a request, a roadmap item — the label does the work of thinking for you, quietly, from that point forward. This is what the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce called the 'fixation of belief': the moment inquiry stops and a settled category takes over, future evidence gets processed through that category rather than against it. For product managers, this has a specific and expensive shape. A bug logged as 'edge case' stops being examined. A user segment named 'power users' attracts resources; the unnamed remainder doesn't. A competing product labeled 'niche' doesn't make it onto the roadmap review. The label was a decision, but it didn't feel like one — it felt like description. Peirce's corrective was to treat all categories as provisional hypotheses carrying an expiration date, not as facts about the world. The practical move is small: when you use a classification that's been stable for more than two quarters, treat it as a research question, not a given. What evidence, if it arrived, would change how you've named this thing?

Name one label your team uses daily — for a user type, a problem category, or a competitor — that you could not tell anyone when it was originally assigned or why.

Drawing from American Pragmatism — Charles Sanders Peirce — 'The Fixation of Belief' (1877) and 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear' (1878)