Re: The philosophical language fallacy (was Re: Evanescence of information (was Re: Going NOMAIL: Honeymoon))

Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:

> The problem is that such taxonomies, outside certain well-defined
> semantic domains such as plants, animals and languages (which can
> be classified genealogically), or chemical compounds (where such a
> taxonomic vocabulary is indeed in use, though with all but the
> simplest molecules, the taxonomic names grow to unwieldy length,
> and - shorter - arbitrary names are used instead), are themselves
> to a large degree arbitrary, and any taxonomy may be obsoleted by
> new discoveries.  If you look at the taxonomies used by Dalgarno
> or Wilkins, you will find many things which now appear either
> quaint or even flatly out of date.
Even inside those semantic domains, problems can come up. Take plant
classification: you've got hundreds of unfamiliar groups, and scattered
among those are a relatively few groups that contain the more familiar
plants. Also, these hierarchies can be wildly unbalanced. Ginkgo is a
whole division of the plant kingdom all by itself, while three levels
deeper on the hierarchy, the family Asteraceae has some 23,000 species
according to Wikipedia.

I was browsing around at random on Wikipedia today and ran across a page
on the controversy over the classification of babblers (Timaliidae),
which reminded me of the problems I ran into when making the taxonomy
for Eklektu. At the time, I thought a classification would be useful in
defining the meanings of words and the boundaries between one and the
other, by defining a particular example as representative of the group,
and using the classification to set the boundaries. But then it turns
out that the groups in the classification are not as well delineated as
you assumed.

> How it confounded my work was that I thought that a classification
> (something like DDC, though I had some ideas that went beyond that,
> but it still was a classification) would actually be useful for
> building web search engines.  Such classifications of course have
> a venerable tradition in libraries, but that was before the digital
> age, and pigeonholing the vast range of topics that exist in this
> world into such a classification is no mean feat.  Perhaps the
> idea I had was not completely worthless, but I found that I was
> running into difficulties which I had not foreseen when I started
> the project.
>
> ... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Yahoo used to have a classified index of web pages (and perhaps still
does; I haven't used it in a long time). I found it useful for finding
pages when I was trying to learn Japanese. Wikipedia's categorical index
can also be useful, although it can be haphazard in places. I still use
categorical word lists for my recent languages, which can be useful for
later clarifying the intended meanings of words if you weren't careful
enough in the first place, or finding words of similar meaning.

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