Normally, me and you(assuming you're not a bot) are easily able to identify whether a predictor is categorical or quantitative. Like, for example, gender is obviously categorical. Your last vote can be classified categorically.
Basically, we can identify categorical predictors easily. But what happens when we input some data in R, and it's lm function makes dummy variables for a predictor? How does it do that?
Somewhat related Question on StackOverflow.