What does the term 'labels' imply in this context?

Question

"Labels are a necessity in the organization of knowledge, but they also constrain our understanding."

I'm interested in what the word labels implies.

According to the definition in the Cambridge Dictionary, it means: a word or a phrase that is used to describe the characteristics or qualities of people, activities, or things, often in a way that is unfair.

In light of that, does it strictly refer to describing characteristics in an unfair fashion or does it simply refer to the use of adequate terminology, which can be unfair in some respect.

Answer 1

It means nomenclature in this context, but the author seems to be interested in a slightly broader context. Without further reading it is unclear if they mean unfair.

However "constrain our understanding" is often a way to describe the way in which categorization often fails to capture what in most fields is actually a spectrum or graduated scale.

e.g. "hot" is a label but it is dependent entirely on context and the threshold can seem arbitrary. Compare "Hot soup" and "hot Jupiter."

Answer 2

Labels in this context serve to identify, codify and organize knowledge.

Thus, for example, we have social class labelling in Britain:

Wikipedia

Such labelling is a form of stereotyping. Stereotyping, which is usually a coarse simplification of the continuum of reality, may often appear to be unfair.