Two significant things happened today. I read Gilbert Ryle on the way to work, and I was thinking about his, “The difference between knowing how and knowing that”, when I ran smack into a project meeting. The client across the table was expressing marked distress over a bright red layout of mine, projected on a screen… The trouble was it didn’t have the brand colours. The theme of the layout was love, and somewhere between his recommendations of blue and the grey, it hit me.

I made the connection...

It was Gilbert Ryle telling me what the trouble was. It was the difference between knowing how and knowing that. The client was making the classic Ryle’s ‘category mistake’. My bastardized version of Ryle’s rendition goes roughly like this.

There’s this intern who’s doing his rounds of the industry, and is being shown the various activities towards brand building. “I see the brand managers” he says, “and the advertisements, the brand manual and the product even… but where the heck is the brand?” The intern’s mistake is his assumption that the word brand belongs to the same category of words that advertisements, brand managers, and brand manuals belong to. Branding is the invisible intended effect of the visible branding effort.

The difference between knowing how and knowing that…

Take colour. Apply semiotic rules. See it as a language. Then you’ll spot my client’s category mistake.
(Though Semeiotics is another system of ‘tagging’ sign structures, all we need to do is acknowledge the fact, not reverse engineer it. It is a classification, not a directive.)

We tend to treat colour as an attribute. Like a tag appended to things. This is a mistake that comes from a functionalistic view of looking. We are taught to accumulate knowledge. That the knowledge of something is nothing, that is until the void is filled with the knowledge of the thing, therefore allowing us to know the thing itself. Therefore A for Apple and apples are red, and red is a safe colour for food, though if you step out on the road at a red signal you’ll probably get killed… and so on.

We are taught to tag colours, in the assumption that we will have the ability to actively use this tag as a thoughtful pre-cursor to an action. Let me paint an example.

There is a new sports drink in the market. A designer is called in to design a poster that should cause people to associate the product to sports and fitness. During the brief, marketing also tells the designer that the brand colours of the firm are lilac and mauve, and he’s told to use it to increase brand recall. This presumes that the end customer will have a tiny pre-thought to the thought he has when he first sees the brochure. That is “Oh, Lilac and Mauve”, //tag// -register colour to Sports Drink name -//tag//... End of pre-thought. //Start of Main thought// “Oh, a sports drink! It makes me want to run around a bit…”

See how category mistakes create a muddle? (Seeing we’re on a roll, the above predicament is the classic Ryle’s Regress. If a thought precedes every action, and a thought is an action of the mind, then what precedes the thought, before the thought? Another thought?)

Contrary to what some ‘experts’ say, a human mind is vastly superior to a system-functional. Our mind allows us direct and absolute perception unmatched by an functionalist system of tagging and meta tagging. Ryle wanted people to see for themselves that the human organism perceives more directly. The human organism does not see a tree, thinks a tree and then perceives a tree. It perceives all at once as only sentience can. Ryle was a philosopher who wrote for the benefit of mankind. I’m a businessman. To me category mistakes are unforgivable, and when my competitors do it, absolutely delightful.

It’s 12.00 Am, and I finished the rest of the chapter. While I type this I realize that this post is about one simple category mistake that relates to colour. There are thousands of creative decisions being made out there by others in the Industry. Some by large firms with mega-ad spends, and there are start-up entrepreneurs who’re turning over their life savings onto identities and product launches. There are legions of client executives who are selling the client ideas, and brand savvy managers who throw back ideas of their own. There is a clamor for ‘customer eyeballs’ and ‘footfalls’ all of which is promised by communication material that costs crores.