Characterization
August 3rd 2007 07:55
* There's infinite things that can be said about you. You might know the words to "Stairway to heaven", have a cousin with the letter "l" in their name, have sat on an elephant in Thailand...
* And facts are often relative to some "system" -- a theory, a sign system, etc. The more such systems there are, the more facts there are. For instance, the fact that you weigh 50kg requires there to be metric measurement. The fact that you're "homo sapiens" depends on a certain conceptual scheme.
* Any fact can be used to classify. You might belong to the class of people who know "Stairway to heaven", the class of people weighing 50kg, etc.
* This phenomenon could be called "multiple characterizability" -- that given any object, there's infinite classes to which you can assign it.
* As an example of how trivial such facts can get, consider the notion of "Cambridge change": -- If I fart, it changes Aristotle, inasmuch as it becomes true of Aristotle that he lived on a planet where one day, over two thousand years later, someone wrote this sentence and farted.
* Outside context, practicality, purpose, there's nothing intrinsically important about any fact or class. For instance, the possession of certain lines on your hand might be irrelevant without the institution of palm-reading. Or your weight mightn't matter if you lived on the moon.
* Everyone quotes this Borges story (from "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins") -- that there's a Chinese encyclopedia, the "Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge", in which it's thought useful to categorize animals as: (1) those that belong to the Emperor; (2) embalmed ones; (3) those that are trained; (4) suckling pigs; (5) mermaids; (6) fabulous ones; (7) stray dogs; (8) those included in the present classification; (9) those that tremble as if they were mad; (10) innumerable ones; (11) those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush; (12) others; (13) those that have just broken a flower vase; and (14) those that from a long way off look like flies.
Notes
-- Wednesday 5 December 2007: Someone recently said to me, "Driving is not a skill, it's a tool." What they're implying is either: (1) whatever they mean by "skill" and "tool", the two are mutually exclusive; or (2) that the two are compatible, but, by whatever criteria one judges into which group driving falls, it is better characterized as tool, not skill.
But what makes a characterization better or worse? And how does one set up the category system, and the criteria of group judgment, in the first place? Aren't these essentially matters of situation and particular purpose at hand?
* And facts are often relative to some "system" -- a theory, a sign system, etc. The more such systems there are, the more facts there are. For instance, the fact that you weigh 50kg requires there to be metric measurement. The fact that you're "homo sapiens" depends on a certain conceptual scheme.
* Any fact can be used to classify. You might belong to the class of people who know "Stairway to heaven", the class of people weighing 50kg, etc.
* This phenomenon could be called "multiple characterizability" -- that given any object, there's infinite classes to which you can assign it.
* As an example of how trivial such facts can get, consider the notion of "Cambridge change": -- If I fart, it changes Aristotle, inasmuch as it becomes true of Aristotle that he lived on a planet where one day, over two thousand years later, someone wrote this sentence and farted.
* Outside context, practicality, purpose, there's nothing intrinsically important about any fact or class. For instance, the possession of certain lines on your hand might be irrelevant without the institution of palm-reading. Or your weight mightn't matter if you lived on the moon.
* Everyone quotes this Borges story (from "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins") -- that there's a Chinese encyclopedia, the "Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge", in which it's thought useful to categorize animals as: (1) those that belong to the Emperor; (2) embalmed ones; (3) those that are trained; (4) suckling pigs; (5) mermaids; (6) fabulous ones; (7) stray dogs; (8) those included in the present classification; (9) those that tremble as if they were mad; (10) innumerable ones; (11) those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush; (12) others; (13) those that have just broken a flower vase; and (14) those that from a long way off look like flies.
***
Notes
-- Wednesday 5 December 2007: Someone recently said to me, "Driving is not a skill, it's a tool." What they're implying is either: (1) whatever they mean by "skill" and "tool", the two are mutually exclusive; or (2) that the two are compatible, but, by whatever criteria one judges into which group driving falls, it is better characterized as tool, not skill.
But what makes a characterization better or worse? And how does one set up the category system, and the criteria of group judgment, in the first place? Aren't these essentially matters of situation and particular purpose at hand?
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