Classy Quotes

“Classification, broadly defined, is the process of organizing knowledge into some systematic order. It has been considered the most fundamental activity of the human mind.” ― Lois Mai Chan (libary scientist), Cataloging and Classification: An Introduction

“We categorize as we do because we have the brains and bodies we have and because we interact in the world as we do.” ― George Lakoff (psychologist), Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

“Our categories arise from the fact that we are neural beings, from the nature of our bodily capacities, from our experience interacting in the world, and from our evolved capacity for basic-level categorization - a level at which we optimally interact with the world. Evolution has not required us to be as accurate above and below the basic level as at the basic level, and so we are not.” ― George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

“Metaphysics in philosophy is, of course, supposed to characterize what is real - literally real. The irony is that such a conception of the real depends upon unconscious metaphors.” ― George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

“When we use such metaphorically derived inference patterns to reason about morality, the principles we get and use are inextricably tied up with ends, goals, and purposes. In such cases, therefore, the deontological picture of ethical deliberation just doesn’t fit. The deontologist will no doubt respond by insisting that we can keep morality (as a source of moral principles) entirely separate from other domains (such as well-being) whenever we are reasoning about morals. This view entails that learning morality is just learning preexisting patterns of moral reasoning and learning how to apply them to concrete cases. However, it is important to see that this is an empirical issue about the nature of human reasoning, and it cannot be decided a priori.” ― George Lakoff, Philosophy In The Flesh

“Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground.” ― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“The classification of facts, the recognition of their sequence and relative significance is the function of science, and the habit of forming a judgment upon these facts unbiased by personal feeling is characteristic of what may be termed the scientific frame of mind.” ― Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science

“The classification of facts and the formation of absolute judgments upon the basis of this classification—judgments independent of the idiosyncrasies of the individual mind—essentially sum up the aim and method of modern science. The scientific man has above all things to strive at self-elimination in his judgments, to provide an argument which is as true for each individual mind as for his own.” ― Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science

(Karl Pearson pretty much took Galton’s statistics and mathed the sh–heck out of it. Biographer of Galton)

“Humans like nothing more than to pigeonhole the events & phenomena that punctuate their lives.” ― China Miéville, Railsea

“Classification may very well not be useless, but it is never analysis, no matter how baroquely detailed and comprehensive-seeming its categories. At best, it begs questions. At worst it is presumptuous and totalitarian, replacing understanding with filing. We have all heard papers where categories are the driving force, according to which the way we understand literature (or whatever) is to work out what title fits where, as if literary theory was a giant card-catalog. Even when the last book has been slotted neatly into the last of the holes that were cut to be filled with books, what we have are books in neat piles. Which is not nothing, but neither is it that much.” ― China Miéville, “On Monsters: Or, Nine or More (Monstrous) Not Cannies”, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Vol. 23, No. 3 (86) (2012), p391, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24353080

“There have been many authorities who have asserted that the basis of science lies in counting or measuring, i.e. in the use of mathematics. Neither counting nor measuring can however be the most fundamental processes in our study of the material universe—before you can do either to any purpose you must first select what you propose to count or measure, which presupposes a classification.” ― Roy A. Crowson (Zoologist, beetles) 1970 Classification and Biology (p.2)

“The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them.” ― Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory

“Branches or types are characterized by the plan of their structure, Classes, by the manner in which that plan is executed, as far as ways and means are concerned, Orders, by the degrees of complication of that structure, Families, by their form, as far as determined by structure, Genera, by the details of the execution in special parts, and Species, by the relations of individuals to one another and to the world in which they live, as well as by the proportions of their parts, their ornamentation, etc.” ― Louis Agassiz, Essay on Classification

“Science is the systematic classification of experience.” ― George Henry Lewes, Physical Basis of Mind

“We classify things for the purpose of doing something to them. Any classification which does not assist manipulation is worse than useless.” ― Randolph Bourne

“I have it in my mind that classification is a necessary condition of the working of the mental implement but that it is a departure from the objective truth of things, that classification is very serviceable for the practical purposes of life but a very doubtful preliminary to those fine penetrations the philosophical purpose, in its more arrogant moods, demands. All the peculiarities of my way of thinking derive from that.

I submit to you that syllogism is based on classification, that all hard logical reasoning tends to imply and is apt to imply a confidence in the objective reality of classification. Consequently in denying that I deny the absolute validity of logic. Classification and number, which in truth ignore the fine differences of objective realities, have in the past of human thought been imposed upon things. […] The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

It was about this difficulty that the mind of Plato played a little inconclusively all his life. For the most part he tended to regard the idea as the something behind reality, whereas it seems to me that the idea is the more proximate and less perfect thing, the thing by which the mind, by ignoring individual differences, attempts to comprehend an otherwise unmanageable number of unique realities.” ― H. G. Wells

“I can understand your concern that works on sex crimes class next to works on gays, but this is an accident of classification, in which some topics must appear next to other topics although there may be no relation between them except that they are a subtopic of a larger subject. . . . To even begin to contemplate any intent other than to arrange works on distinct topics on the shelves boggles the mind.”

The book before you provides an account of an attempt to perform this mind-boggling work.” ― Melissa Adler, Cruising the Library: Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge.

Faculty page: https://gws.as.uky.edu/users/maad227

“…that when the Platypus was discovered, scientists said it was a paradox. But Pirsig’s point was it was never a paradox or an oddity. It didn’t make sense only to the scientists because they viewed the nature of animals according to their own classification, when nature did not have any.” ― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“There is no end to the study and classification of [the] different manifest and hidden attributes, forms, and meaning [of things that exist]. In all of this [are things] held from thought and from sight.” ― Zakariya al-Qazwini

“The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can any one conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.” – Werner Heisenberg, responding to Positivism. Source: Wikipedia

“Our categories are important. We cannot organize a social life, a political movement, or our individual identities and desires without them. The fact that categories invariably leak and can never contain all the relevant “existing things” does not render them useless, only limited. Categories like “woman,” “butch,” “lesbian,” or “transsexual” are all imperfect, historical, temporary, and arbitrary. We use them, and they use us. We use them to construct meaningful lives, and they mold us into historically specific forms of personhood. Instead of fighting for immaculate classifications and impenetrable boundaries, let us strive to maintain a community that understands diversity as a gift, sees anomalies as precious, and treats all basic principles with a hefty dose of skepticism.” ― Gayle Rubin

“The Only Group That Can Categorize Everything Is Everybody” ― Clay Shirky

“To grow interested in any piece of information, we need somewhere to ‘put’ it, which means some way of connecting it to an issue we already now how to care about.” ― Alain de Botton, The News: A User’s Manual

“Nature,” instead of representing some pristine category or originary state of being, has taken on an entirely different function … [it has become nothing more (or less) than an ordering factor–a construct by means of which we attempt to keep technology visible as something separate from our “natural” selves and our everyday lives. In other words, the category “nature,” rather than referring to any object or category in the world, is a strategy for maintaining boundaries for political and economic ends, and thus a way of making meaning.” ― Allucquère Rosanne Stone

“There’s no evidence from decades of Pew Research surveys that public opinion, in the aggregate, is more extreme now than in the past. But what has changed – and pretty dramatically – is the growing tendency of people to sort themselves into political parties based on their ideological differences.” ― Paul Taylor & Pew Research Center, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown (2016)

“The human compulsion to group people and objects together was ingrained in our being since we evolved. We need to group things, group the dangerous and unknown from the ‘safe to eat’ or the ‘it won’t eat you’ categories. Without the ability to categorize these threats, our ancestors wouldn’t have survived.” ― Charlie Caruso, Understanding Y

“Respecting differences while gaining insight into our essential connected-ness, we can free ourselves from the impulse to rigidly categorize the world in terms of narrow boundaries and labels.” ― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“Simply put, the DSM is a highly constructed projection placed on top of particular body-mind experiences in order to label, organize, and make meanings of them from within a specific worldview.” ― Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure

“The desire to categorize humans along racial lines, and the impulse to superpose attributes such as intelligence (or criminality, creativity, or violence) on those lines, illustrates a general theme concerning genetics and categorization. Like the English novel, or the face, say, the human genome can be lumped and split in a million different ways. But whether to split or lump, to categorize or synthesize, is a choice. … The narrower the definition of the heritable feature or the trait, the more likely we will find a genetic locus for that trait, and the more likely we will find that the trait will segregate within some human sub-population.” ― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“It may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages. If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world; and if all extinct languages, and all intermediate and slowly changing dialects, were to be included, such an arrangement would be the only possible one. Yet it might be that some ancient languages had altered very little and had given rise to few new languages, whilst others had altered much owing to the spreading, isolation, and state of civilisation of the several co-descended races, and had thus given rise to many new dialects and languages. The various degrees of difference between the languages of the same stock, would have to be expressed by groups subordinate to groups; but the proper or even the only possible arrangement would still be genealogical; and this would be strictly natural, as it would connect together all languages, extinct and recent, by the closest affinities, and would give the filiation and origin of each tongue.” ― Charles Darwin

?

“This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.” ― Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

“Still, the alien biologist might be excused for lumping together the whole biosphere - all the retroviruses, mantas, foraminifera, mongongo trees, tetanus bacilli, hydras, diatoms, stromatolite-builders, sea slugs, flatworms, gazelles lichens, corals, spirochetes, banyans, cave ticks, least bitters, caracaras, tufted puffins, ragweed pollen, wold spiders, horseshoe crabs, black mambas, monarch butterflies, whiptail lizards, trypanosomes, birds of paradise, electric eels, wild parsnips, arctic terns, fireflies, titis, chrysanthemums, hammerhead sharks, rotifers, wallabies, malarial plasmodia, tapirs, aphids, water moccasins, morning glories, whooping cranes, komodo dragons, periwinkles millipede larvae, angler fish, jellyfish lungfish, yeast, giant redwoods, tardigrades, archaebacteria, sea lilies, lilies of the valley, humans bonobos, squid and humpback whales - as, simply, Earthlife. The arcane distinctions among these swarming variations on a common theme may be left to specialists or graduate students. The pretensions and conceits of this or that species can readily be ignored. There are, after-all, so many worlds about which an extraterrestrial biologist must know. It will be enough if a few salient and generic characteristics of life on yet another obscure planet are noted for the cavernous recesses of the galactic archives.” ― Carl Sagan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

“I can’t blame you for trying to categorize me. It’s a human instinct. It’s why scientists are, to this day, completely flabbergasted by the duck-billed platypus: it’s furry like a mammal, but lays eggs like a bird. It defies conventional classification. I AM THE PLATYPUS (Coo coo ka-choo)” ― Jeff Garvin, Symptoms of Being Human

“We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served.” ― Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

William H. Calvin, The Cerebral Code (1996) MIT Press [pages 159-160]:

“Kant said that our metaphors comprise the conceptual spectacles through which we view the world. … If we are to have meaningful, connected experiences — ones that we can comprehend and reason about — we must be able to discern patterns to our actions, perceptions, and conceptions. Underlying our vast network of interrelated literal meanings (all of those words about objects and actions) are those imaginative structures of understanding such as schema and metaphor, such as the mental imagery that allows us to extrapolate a path, or zoom in on one part of the whole, or zoom out until the trees merge into a forest.”

Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind (1987) University of Chicago Press. pages xiv-xv:

“Through metaphor, we make use of patterns that obtain in our physical experience to organise our more abstract understanding.”

“[T]he close relationship between linguistics and pattern recognition is not so often realized or acknowledged.” — L. da F.Costa [1]*

Hardy: “Why do you need a category?” Miller: “I need to understand.” —Broadchurch, S1E8

“People data is sensitive – it’s data with feelings.” – Ian Cook, https://www.visier.com/clarity/predictive-people-analytics-machine-learning/