Anything wrong with "ontology" to you other than that it's not very precise, as in this process is part of ontology but just saying "ontology" doesn't really say anything about this particular process?
"Ontology" also has the connotation of the big questions of what kind of stuff the world is; what's called the top-level ontology when people are being more precise. I'm not talking about questions of putting the physical and the mental in the right relation to each other and so on.
Lauren Lee responded on facebook to my post about locating yourself as an instance of a class:
To react to a thing, some part of you needs to recognize that it is a thing.
In Retroactive Readmission of Evidence, Conor says:
In Why and How to Name Things, Conor discusses how a proliferation of named things broadens what we can think about.
In Outside View as the Main Debiasing Technique, I discuss how simply knowing about a bias can allow you to wake up when the bias is about to happen, and course-correct. Grognor and I expressed a similar sentiment in A List of Nuances. Grognor writes about why lumping errors are easier to make than splitting errors.
All of these things assume that potential categories come from somewhere, but don't say much about where they come from. You can take outside view all you want and never get anywhere if you have the wrong categories. But how do we get better categories?
Lauren Lee suggests we make predictions and watch for what drives our behavior. I agree with her that there's probably a bunch of advice for this. But, I suspect none of it will stick very well until we have a good name for the problem. What do we call the problem of cutting the world at its joints?
Lots of bad names come to mind. Reification. Ontology. Class formation, concept formation, category formation. Object segmentation. Factoring the world. For now, I think all of them are trumped by "That's a thing!".