OT: Categories (was: Re: OT: In the 'ignorance on parade' file)

In a message dated 8/18/01 9:30:08 PM, artabanos@MAIL.UTEXAS.EDU writes:

<< I dunno.  The problem for me has never been creating the organization, per

se, but rather it was determining what level of organization should be or even

could be encoded.  I mean, could we not encode not just a given object's

relationship to other given objects, but also the given object's entire
internal

atomic chemistry, every historical position in at least four dimensions of
each

atom since the beginning of the universe, and who it slept with last night?
To

me, there seems to be no nonarbitrary way to say what kinds of information

must be encoded in a language's grammar and what must not.  (Indeed, this

forms the basis of Alexander Carstairs-McCarthy's theory on the origin of

human language, which proceeds from the question of why human language

syntax fundamentally distinguishes NPs and VPs, since there seems no inherent

reason for it to do so outside the course of human evolution that we have
actually

taken.) >>

    I've been reading this thread with interest.  It takes me back to my
cognitive science class.  If you'd like to read a massive book on categories,
I'd recommend "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things" by George Lakoff.  If you'd
like to read a small book on metaphor that kind of alludes to categories,
there's always "Metaphors We Live By" by the same author.  But anyway, there
does seem to be an answer, and that is that the associations are arbitrary.
While no one would put an elephant into the "fish" category as English
speakers see it, they would put them together in other categories (e.g.,
"animals"), but what does and does not have category membership isn't the
fascinating part about categories.  Partly, it's merely the fact that they
exist.  It seems that humans can't look at something without categorizing it.
 As to the different ways to classify things, well, there're the languages of
the Earth to sift through.  So, going back to this statement:

<<So, to me, saying that it is not ultimately

up to us to decide where one category should begin and where another

ends sounds tantamount to saying that we do not also have the freedom

to choose what categories are and are not useful for our perception of

reality.>>

I'd say that (a) it is ultimately up to us to make decisions on category
membership (we do this daily), and category membership does change (quite
significantly, in fact) over time, but (b) it's not as if we conciously
invent categories.  I'm not sure if that's what you meant to imply here, but
the human brain is so entrenched in categorization that we just would cease
to be human if we somehow lost our natural instinct to categorize.
    To comment directly on the first paragraph I copied:

<<I mean, could we not encode not just a given object's

relationship to other given objects, but also the given object's entire
internal

atomic chemistry, every historical position in at least four dimensions of
each

atom since the beginning of the universe, and who it slept with last night?
To

me, there seems to be no nonarbitrary way to say what kinds of information

must be encoded in a language's grammar and what must not.>>

    The answer to the second question (as the research of the time would
suggest, that is; I'm not putting myself up as an authority, just a
transmittor) is yes.  The answer to the first question, of course, is also
yes.  However, no languages on Earth do that.  Why?  It's not too terribly
convenient, which is, ultimately, the point of categorization.  Eventually,
though, categories become outdated and less convenient, at which point they
change to become more convenient.  Take the concept of "tree".
Industrialization introduced human thought to a whole new category in "tree".
 There's no concept for "tree" in most languages in their infant stages, and
in the languages of "indigenous" peoples that still exist (I'm always unsure
of what word to use; my professors use "indigenous").  If you explained to a
native speaker of one of these languages just what a "tree" was, they
wouldn't be able to draw it.  They might be able to draw a specific tree (an
oak, an elm), but the idea of them coming with one single image that
represented all trees would be nearly impossible.  For industrialized me,
however, I think of a thing that sticks out of the ground with a brown trunk
and green leaves in a some-what circular shape around the top.  It's easy for
me.  I've become so urbanized, in fact, that I can't really name specific
trees, except for really non-central members, like palm trees and
weeping-willow trees.  Thus, the true basic categories (oak, elm, palm) have
been lost for me, supplanted by this category known as "tree".
    How did I get here?  Oh, right, why languages don't categorize things
certain ways.  There are some strange examples.  I can't remember all of
them...  Of course, there are things categorized by animacy, gender
(grammatical or physical), use, and arbitrary.  Like Dyirbal (which I know
has been mentioned here before) with their categories: 1) Male, 2) Female, 3)
Plant, 4) Everything else.  Seems pretty straight-forward.  However, "sun" is
put into the female category because they have a myth about the sun and the
moon in which the sun is female and the moon is male (odd, huh?  Different, I
should say).  Also, since the sun gives off heat and is made of fire, so to
speak, "fire" is put into the female category.  Fair enough.  Since fire is a
dangerous thing, though, any dangerous thing is put into the female category:
knives, spears, guns.  So now there's this association drawn from a myth that
one would have never guessed just looking at the language from the outside.
There are other weird examples from this language, too.  Like plants are
usually put into the plant category, but there was a certain type of tree
they used for firewood, or something, and that was put into the female
category because of that (vague memories).  Then I think all animals were put
into the male category except for this one insect...  The hairy tick?  Stink
beetle?  Some unpleasant sounding thing that was put into the female category
because when it bit you it felt like your skin was burning.
    Anyway, one could go on for hours and hours talking about this and what
is a member of a category for one person and what isn't for another...  Just
something to think about.

-David

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