How integrated a person’s category-determining mental states are: Quine 1951 argues that our beliefs about the world are interconnected with one another, and that no belief can be assessed against our experience of the world on its own, in isolation from our other beliefs. Each person, according to Quine, forms a “web of belief” by systematizing the stimuli the person receives from the world. A person’s ontological categories are a product of that network, and any change to the network affects the network as a whole. Other approaches to the mentalistic construction of social categories are more piecemeal, with the determination of each category ontologically independent of one another.