From Concepts and Reasoning

to

Classifications, Standards, and Information Infrastructures

Concepts > Categories

• individuals and categories ( cognitive process at root of forming beliefs and categorization)

• the importance of categorization: moving from disorder to order

• Borges, Funes the Memorious

From: Funes the Memorious

We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table; Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of

the Quebracho ... … These recollections were not simple; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day. He told me: I have more memories in myself alone than all men have hadsince the world was a world. And again: My dreams are like your vigils. And again, toward dawn: My memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal….

From: Funes the Memorious

… The two projects I have indicated (an infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, and a usable mental catalogue of all the images of memory) are lacking in sense, but they reveal a certain stammering greatness. They allow us to make out dimly, or to infer, the dizzying world of Funes. He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of general, platonic ideas. ...... It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him on every occasion. ...

Classical Categories

• “Classical” categories (also: Aristotelian, all-or-none, rule governed)

Examples: grandmother = “mother of a parent”even number = “integer exactly divisible by

2”bachelor = “unmarried man”

Classical Categories vs. Family Resemblance Categories

• Family Resemblance Categories (prototypes; best example of a kind)

Classical Categories

• Aristotelian, all-or-none, rule-governed• Examples:

even number=‘integer divisible by 2’grandmother=‘mother of a parent’

• Theory: concepts are definitions in the head to sort out, map concepts in relation to each other

• list of properties common to all the members of a category (necessary conditions = genus proximum) and

• list of properties common only to the members of that category (sufficient conditions = differentia specifica)

• concepts are difficult to define (critique: Wittgenstein) (anomalous concepts: “game” = fun & amusing (chess?) / winners & losers (solitaire? child throwing a ball against a wall?)

Prototypical Categories

• Prototypes• There are no common properties; different properties are shared by

different subsets

• Therefore, a family has a prototype (prototype chair, prototype bird, prototype bachelor)

• Different properties shared by different subsets (“game” = winner/loser (baseball and chess); hard thinking (chess & solitaire); physical activity (child bouncing a ball against the wall)

• Unclear cases: Is avocado vegetable or fruit?

What about categories that do have a definition?

“Bachelor” • Arthur has been living happily with Alice for the last five years. They have a two

year old daughter and have never officially married.

• Bruce was going to be drafted, so he arranged with his friend Barbara to have a justice of the peace marry them so he would be exempt. They have never lived together. He dates a number of women, and plans to have the marriage annulled as soon as he finds someone he wants to marry.

• Charlie is 17 years old. He lives at home with his parents and is in high school.

• David is 17 years old. He left home at l3, started a small business, and is now a successful young entrepreneur leading a playboy’s lifestyle in his penthouse apartment.

• Eli and Edgar are homosexual lovers who have been living together for many years.

• Faisal is allowed by the law of his native Abu Dhabi to have three wives. He currently has two and is interested in meeting another potential fiancée.

• Father Gregory is the bishop of the Catholic cathedral at Groton upon Thames.

Features of Family Resemblance categories

• Prototype

• Unclear cases:– Is garlic a vegetable? Is ketchup?

– Is a SUV a car or a truck?

– Evolutionary missing links, e.g. Is arhceotpteryx a bird?

– Characteristic non-defining features, e.g. for grandmothers having glasses constitute a prototype

– What about “librarian” prototype?

Features of Family Resemblance categories

• Prototype of librarian?

Evidence for the psychological reality of family

resemblance categories

• Psychological reality of prototypes is witnessed by studies

People agree on goodness of membership (bird: robin=higher score, chicken=lower score)

People classify prototypical members faster (is a robin a bird?)

Kids use word with prototypical exemplars first

So are Classical Categories fictitious?

• The mind contains both family resemblance categories and classical categories

• Fuzzy and all-or-none judgments coexist in people’s minds

7 is prototypical odd number (447 not so good)

Mother is a good example of female; waitress, comedienne, professor not so good

A Second Major Fact about Categories

• Every entity belongs to many categories, related in a hierarchy

• But one level of categorization is psychologically most natural (Eleanor Rosch - the “Basic Level”)

• Basic Level is highest level at which objects– Share many attributes

– Allow similar actions to be applied to them

– Have similar shapes

– Can be identified from average shape

living thing

animal plant fungus …

mammal fish bird …

dog cat horse …

labrador beagle poodle …

yellow lab black lab …

dog animal, labradormammal

apple fruit granny smith applefood

car vehicle sports carmachine

bird animal sparrow

chair furniture armchair

Why the Basic Level?

• Purpose of categories: to infer unseen properties from seen properties (i.e. if it barks, it’s a dog, if it bites chases sticks)

• Subordinate categories (e.g. black lab) allow lots of inferences but are hard to assign

• Superordinate categories (e.g. animal) are easy to assign but don’t allow so many inferences

• Basic level: in between

Deductive / Inductive Reasoning

• Deductive inference: general to specific > certain

Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. :: Socrates is mortal.

• Inductive inference: specific to general > probabilisticP1…P2 … P3 … Pn

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle are men. Socrates is mortal. Plato is mortal. :: Aristotle is mortal.

Normative vs. Descriptive models

• A normative model for deductive inference: logic

• A normative model for inductive inference: probability theory

• normative model = “how people should think” (predictors, deterministic)

• descriptive model = “how people do think”

We live in a ‘classification society.’ (Bowker & Star, 323)

The myriad of classifications and standards that surround

and support the modern world, however, often blind

people to the importance of the ‘other’ category asconstitutive of the whole social architecture (Derrida 1980,

quoted in B&S 1999, 301)

Classifications are powerful technologies when embedded

in working infrastructures

Investigating Infrastructure (Bowker & Star, 9)

• What goes into making things work like magic? Making them fit together so that we can buy a radio built bysomeone we have never met and it works.• This magic involves much work. Who does thecategorization work? • What happens to the cases that do not fit? We want to draw

attention to cases that do not fit easily into our magical created world of standards and classifications: the left-handers in the world of right-handed magic, chronic disease sufferers in the acute world of allopathic medicine, the vegetarian in MacDonald’s?

Rethinking the nature of information systems (enabling workpractice) by rethinking categorization tools

Categories > Information Infrastructures scale • communities of practice (networks of people related

through distinct activities)

• processes of naturalization and categorization– (‘laws of nature,’ ‘scientific objectivity and claims to truth’

are completely naturalized and become standards in the Western world)

• boundary objects are tools and techniques that enable production and maintenance to achieve coherence across intersecting communities (in mathematics, medicine, statistics for scholarly communication)

Information Infrastructures• categorization work: category of the ordinary and other

category

• naturalization is powerful because it defines the boundary of ordinary / other (social control; hegemonic thought associated with the cultural leadership of one group, exclusion of other perspectives)

• borderlands, cyborgs, the ethics of ambiguity

• ethical and political understanding of information systems whose categories attach to individuals

Information Infrastructures• need to manage multiplicity of naturalizations (in

concrete representation through information technologies)

• tension bw unified and universally applicable information system and chimera-like, distributed, boundary-object driven information system fully respectful of the needs of the variety of communities it serves (tension of local:global)

• combine bureaucratic tools for classification and local variation (e.g. hospital information system)

Sources used:

• Steven Pinker (MIT): lecture slides, “Concepts and Reasoning”

• Bowker & Star: Sorting Things Out (MIT Press, 1999)