Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority recounts how philosophers of the late third century C.E. organized the spirit world into hierarchies, positioning themselves as high priests in the process. By establishing themselves as experts on sacred matters, they fortified their authority, prestige, and reputation.

Why might alternative taxonomies be needed in contemporary life, and how might the notion of categorisation or anti-categorisation be thought speculatively? This essay considers some of the ways that life and matter have been historically divided and segmented and asks how this might be rendered mobile, offering new divisions and definitions for those who exist outside hegemonic segments or scales.

The idea that there are objective natural species in nature has a long history and continues to be widely accepted. This approach assumes that science directly describes the world by formulating laws of nature based solely on empirical data. However, there are method­ological and practical contradictions in the process of constructing taxonomies, such as the impossibility of choosing a single classification criterion or establishing boundaries between taxonomic classes. These issues can be resolved by understanding taxonomies from a communicative and socio-cultural (...) perspective. Taxonomies are fundamental to sci­entific research, but their development may depend not only on scientific factors but also on societal relevance and interest. Principles based on rigorous methods and experimental practices, which ensure consistency and accuracy in biological and linguistic classifica­tion, remain at the heart of taxonomical work. But at the same time, the collaborative pro­cesses of developing and applying scientific knowledge, which are characteristic of post-normal science, allow us to make scientifically sound decisions in situations of high risk and uncertainty. External stakeholders are involved in the internal scientific processes and the decision-making process regarding the direction of scientific research. The article, in the form of case studies, using examples such as classifications of pathogen vectors of zoonotic diseases and malaria mosquitoes, and language classification, shows how the structure of science is changing, with external scientific communication, becoming an integral part of the research process. Taxonomic systems are no longer just a card-in­dex, but become a platform for interaction between scientific, social, and linguistic fac­tors, balancing the ideals of classical science with its applicability in the real world. (shrink)

This article appeared as a response to the article by Anna Sakharova “Taxonomies and scientific communication: a sociocultural approach to scientific classifications”, which I read in the manuscript. It proposes a social-constructivist approach to taxonomies in sci­ence, drawing on a number of representative cases from biology, medicine, and linguis­tics. Generally agreeing with this approach, I will draw attention to a number of con­troversial details and arguments, as well as cite some considerations that allow, in my opinion, to present the classification (...) activity in science in an even more complex and contradictory form. Usually, one expects from a philosopher of science providing a dif­ferent result: in this case, she must draw a logically coherent and empirically impeccable picture of the construction of scientific taxonomies. However, difficulties come to the fore, which, even if being overcome by scientists on this path, reproduce themselves in a dif­ferent form. Taxonomies are not based on reality per se, their ontology appears under the influence of a complex constellation of theoretical, empirical, metaphysical, value, and social factors. Taxonomies are constructed by scientists, they are not objective, but relative, their reality is legitimized not by nature, but by scientific communication. Philo­sophical analysis of scientific taxonomies gives an image of science as a constant search for the coherence of knowledge – coherence that is not the norm, but the ideal. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Plot Taxonomies and IntentionalityJon AdamsEver popular among the various topics occupying non-academic conversations about literature—such as the identity of the real author of the plays attributed to "Shakespeare"—is the notion that there exists only a finite number of storylines, and that all the stories we know are only ever complications or rehearsals of these few, elementary plots. What is the status of that claim? The issue gains a renewed (...) relevance in light of literary criticism's recent interest in the possibilities of employing evolutionary psychology as a means of naturalising literary study, but interest in plot taxonomies stretches a long way back. Why might we seek to categorise plots into a finite taxonomy? And what are the implications of the claim if true?Organising literature into any classificatory scheme is an attempt to achieve something like the coherence that the natural sciences have achieved—in chemistry and physics with the composition of the periodic table, and in biology with Linnaean classification. Much of science's epistemic prestige is rooted in the enormous success with which they have organised and categorised their subject of study. In searching for mechanism and pattern, the natural sciences proceed confidently from the belief that those mechanisms and patterns exist to be discovered, and that (relatively) simple rules underlie the manifest complexity of natural phenomena.Unfortunately, the study of literary fiction has no such security. There are two senses here in which we can talk of literature being patterned. At the micro-level, we have the question of whether individual works can be thought of as internally patterned. Usually, this type of patterning is easy enough to establish and recognise, and something the author is (or ought to be) in a good position to control. But, of course, internal [End Page 102] structures are not always conspicuous, and readers faced with an overtly complex text, like Pound's Cantos, or Finnegans Wake, have no guarantee that there is sense to be made of it. Surface complexity may shield a profound and subtle architecture, or the work may be as unstructured, fragmentary, and chaotic as it initially appears. A frustrated Wayne C. Booth draws attention to the problem: "One can't be sure that Finnegans Wake is not a great novel; perhaps someday readers will discover that the complex structure they now dream of and quarrel about is a realizable structure, an experienced structure. I doubt it, but it may happen. Until then, each new intricacy discovered... reveals precisely nothing more than that: a new intricacy."1 What's missing is a conceptual centre around which overall coherence might be achieved from what had seemed to be unconnected parts. Even so, if this sort of centre cannot be found in the individual work, it may yet obtain between works. In other words, The Cantos or Finnegans Wake may yet occupy nodal roles in a larger system, within which they acquire a previously unrecognized unity and order. This type of organization is something the individual author is obviously in a much less suitable position to control. Nonetheless, mapping out this larger, macro-level order is a task that literary criticism might want to take on. There is the example Borges uses of how Kafka's work retrospectively confers a familial similarity upon previously unconnected works. The quality of being "Kafkaesque" is the only thing common to the pieces, but was not apparent (or rather—the paradox that excites Borges—did not exist) prior to Kafka's writing.2 This is the second sense in which literature might be thought of as patterned; that is, not within works, but across them. On the larger scale, is it possible that literature as a whole could be understood as patterned?The notion that literature can be understood "as a whole," and its corollary, that a literature so understood would submit to taxonomical classification, is an enduring one. Anthropologists and art historians have long acknowledged that there appear to be recurring themes, motifs, and commonalities across world cultures, and consequently, commonalities among the narratives those cultures construct and consume. Cataloguing these similarities has produced a variety of classificatory systems.In the mid-nineteenth century, German scholar Adolf... (shrink)

The article deals with the problem of taxonomies as an illustration of a particular scien­tific practice. It is shown that the question of the nature of taxonomies is resolved in ac­cordance with the choice of attitude to the internal and external tasks of science. The pos­sibility of forming taxonomies from the prevailing social perspective is challenged. It is demonstrated that considering taxonomies as a social phenomenon jeopardizes the deve­lopment of effective communication within the scientific community. It is established that, despite (...) the serious public signals to science in times of extraordinary global events related to epidemics, the ways to address them are not conventional and are within the purview of scientists. An attempt is made to understand the prospects of building a unified taxonomic system not only as a technically unified base, but also as a universal empirical basis for a multitude of biological concepts. Using academic platforms as an example, it is demonstrated why, despite the rapid development of artificial intelligence and big data, the instrumental resolution of conceptual problems remains significantly limited. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Folk Taxonomies Versus Official TaxonomiesNick Haslam (bio)Keywordsclassification, DSM-IV, folk taxonomyFlanagan and Blashfield’s paper continues a highly original program of research on clinicians’ understandings of psychopathology. This work is unique in bringing concepts and methods from cognitive anthropology to bear on psychiatric classification. At first blush, it might seem questionable to treat clinicians’ beliefs about psychiatric disorders as folk taxonomies, no different in kind from classifications of birds produced by (...) members of a forest-dwelling tribe. Unlike birds and other natural objects of folk taxonomies, mental disorders are not concrete entities and they cannot be distinguished on perceptual grounds. Unlike tribespeople, clinicians are not simply “folk” whose naïve classifications can be compared with those of scientific authorities. They are, in fact, heavily exposed to the reigning official taxonomy during their professional training, and their thinking can hardly remain unaffected by it. It is a testament to Flanagan and Blashfield’s work that despite these apparent disanalogies, their folk-taxonomic approach manages to illuminate how clinicians carve up the psychiatric domain.This paper reports some careful, creative, and labor-intensive studies to make a few fundamental claims about how clinicians classify. First, the authors argue that clinicians hold simplified taxonomies compared with the official DSM-IV taxonomy: They encompass fewer disorders and classify them in a shallower hierarchy. Second, they claim that clinicians substantially agree in how they classify disorders, and that a consensus classification can therefore be extracted from their individual taxonomies. Third, they argue that clinicians’ taxonomies show only a modest consistency with DSM-IV, and that the discrepancies may be systematic and important. Notably, for example, clinicians did not preserve the fundamental divide between the DSM’s Axes I and II. My comments address the second and third claims.Is There a “Consensus” among the Clinicians?One of the main achievements of Flanagan and Blashfield’s paper is to develop a “consensual taxonomy,” which is laid out in their Table 2a. This taxonomy clearly distils how their clinicians tended to judge the relations among diagnoses. However, it is an exaggeration to present it as a consensus. If, by Romney, Weller, and Batchelder’s (1986) third criterion, “cultural consensus” requires that the primary factor in a principal components analysis accounts for “most” of the variance in clinicians’ judgments, then Flanagan and Blashfield’s analysis [End Page 281] fails to show consensus. Their first factor accounts for only twenty-five percent of the variance, well short of the required majority. This finding implies that there is three times as much inconsistency or variability among clinicians’ taxonomic judgments than there is consistency and commonality. The observed factor-analytic findings are compatible with the average correlation between pairs of clinicians being only about 0.2, a very weak level of agreement.This is not to say that there is no consistency among the clinicians, or that there is no value in summarizing that consistency, but it does indicate that there is a great deal of diversity as well. Clinicians’ folk taxonomies seem to be highly idiosyncratic, more a Babel of distinctive classifications than a chorus of agreement. It is therefore risky to draw strong generalizations about how clinicians classify, and to imply that there is a single consensual taxonomy.Several things are very interesting about this diversity of classifications. First, Flanagan and Blashfield show that it cannot be explained by the clinicians’ differing levels of experience or by the different methodologies used to elicit their taxonomies. The variability among clinicians must therefore have some other basis, which awaits further investigation. Second, the level of agreement (“consensus”) obtained here is significantly lower than what has been found in more orthodox studies of folk taxonomy. By implication, the classification of psychiatric disorders is a slipperier enterprise than the classification of animals and plants. People who have extensive professional experience and training in the field of psychopathology—vocational training that includes the standardizing forces of accrediting bodies and a dominant psychiatric nosology—nevertheless tend not to agree substantially about how to map that territory. One guess about why this might be is that clinicians’ folk taxonomies are not merely descriptive maps of the interrelations among diagnostic entities, but are... (shrink)

In his mature works, Kuhn abandons the concept of a paradigm and becomes more interested in the analysis of the conceptual structure of scientific theories. These changes are interpreted as resulting from a ‘linguistic turn’ that Kuhn underwent sometimes around the 1980s. Much of the philosophical discussions about Kuhn’s post-‘linguistic turn’ philosophy revolves around his views on taxonomic concepts. Apart from taxonomy, however, the mature Kuhn introduces other concepts, such as conceptual networks and lexicons. This article distinguishes these three concepts (...) and shows that adopting each one of them has different impacts on Kuhn’s model of science. After distinguishing and assessing the concepts of taxonomy, network, and lexicon, it will be argued that the latter not only fits the Kuhnian model of science better, but it also helps capture the wide sense of Kuhn’s early concept of a paradigm. (shrink)

A clear understanding of terminology is crucial in any academic field. When it is clear that complex interdisciplinary concepts are interpreted differently depending on the academic field, geographical setting or cultural values, it is time to take action. Given this, the Glossary for Academic Integrity, newly developed by the European Network for Academic Integrity project, served as the basis for compiling a comprehensive taxonomy of terms related to academic integrity. Following a rigorous coding exercise, the taxonomy was partitioned into three (...) constituent components – Integrity, Misconduct and Neutral terms. A review of relevant literature sources is included, and the strengths and weaknesses of existing taxonomies are discussed in relation to this new offering. During the creation of these artefacts the authors identified and resolved many differences between their individual interpretative understandings of concepts/terms and the viewpoints of others. It is anticipated that the freely-available glossary and taxonomy will be explored and valued by researchers, teachers, students and the general public alike. (shrink)

Melipona beecheii is a stingless bee that has been bred by Maya communities in the Yucatán Peninsula for over 2,500 years, and it has played a crucial role in beekeeping practices since then. This paper reconstructs the entangled history of this bee in the archives of taxonomy. It does so by first reviewing its former names such as Xunan Kaab in Yucatec Maya, “Domestic Bee of Yucatán” and “Mexican Domestic Bee,” and then asking what is discarded when a scientific name (...) is given. The paper then discusses how nineteenth-century naturalists and taxonomists erased its domestic character while standardizing its species name. The author argues that this erasure was not accidental and analyzes how the power of naming – or of erasing a name – in scientific practice is intertwined with forms of domination. To elucidate this, this article traces changes in taxonomic labels over time, including their inconsistencies and relationships to vernacular names marginalized in beekeeping history. In addition, it considers various sites of production, such as laboratories and haciendas, as equally valid sites of knowledge production and experimentation. The places and scientific spaces in which Melipona beecheii has been collected and observed have had a profound impact on the “politics of erasure” of its domestic character. (shrink)

This short article is a commentary to ‘Vulnerability in Research Ethics: A way forward’ from Margaret Meek Lange, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds. In their article they describe and accept my criticisms of the subpopulation approach to vulnerability and my analysis of vulnerability based on layers, but they suggest going beyond it using a taxonomy to classify layers of vulnerabilty. I argue that a) we do not need a taxonomy to classify vulnerabilities, b) the authors do not provide an adequate (...) or successful taxonomy, and c) they are unable to link their taxonomy to specific obligations. Thus I propose avoiding an approach that requires taxonomies, and suggest instead using some characteristics of layers of vulnerability. (shrink)

A topological classification scheme consists of two ingredients: (1) an abstract class K of topological spaces; and (2) a "taxonomy", i.e. a list of first order sentences, together with a way of assigning an abstract class of spaces to each sentence of the list so that logically equivalent sentences are assigned the same class. K is then endowed with an equivalence relation, two spaces belonging to the same equivalence class if and only if they lie in the same classes prescribed (...) by the taxonomy. A space X in K is characterized within the classification scheme if whenever Y ∈ K and Y is equivalent to X, then Y is homeomorphic to X. As prime example, the closed set taxonomy assigns to each sentence in the first order language of bounded lattices the class of topological spaces whose lattices of closed sets satisfy that sentence. It turns out that every compact two-complex is characterized via this taxonomy in the class of metrizable spaces, but that no infinite discrete space is so characterized. We investigate various natural classification schemes, compare them, and look into the question of which spaces can and cannot be characterized within them. (shrink)

Work with people with Williams syndrome is reviewed relative to Atran's claim that the universality of taxonomic rank in the animal and plant domains derives from a biological construal of generic species. From this work it is argued that a biological construal of animals is not necessary for the construction of the adult taxonomy of animals and therefore that the existence of an animal (or plant) taxonomy cannot be taken as evidence of a biological domain.

Without question the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, by Benjamin Bloom and associates, is currently the most influential work in the theory of curriculum. Here I summarize Bloom’s taxonomies, survey a variety of criticisms raised by others, and conclude that there are serious philosophical problems remainmg to be addressed concerning both the structure and scope of the taxonomies.

Using methods from anthropology and cognitive psychology, this study investigated the relationship between clinicians’ folk taxonomies of mental disorder and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Expert and novice psychologists were given sixty-seven DSM-IV diagnoses, asked to discard unfamiliar diagnoses, put the remaining diagnoses into groups that had “similar treatments” using hierarchical (making more inclusive and less inclusive groups) and dimensional (placing groups in a two-dimensional space) methodologies, and give names to the groups in their taxonomies. Clinicians (...) were familiar with a substantially smaller number of diagnoses than are in the DSM. Cultural consensus analysis and follow-up residual agreement analysis revealed similarities across clinicians’ folk taxonomies. Correlations between folk taxonomies and the DSM were moderate. Cluster analysis showed that clinicians preserved DSM higher order categories (e.g., mood disorders) but not the Axis I–Axis II distinction. This study suggests important differences between the way clinicians conceptualize mental disorders and the organization of the DSM-IV. (shrink)

This paper introduces the idea that if theories of history generate different taxonomies of history they too are incommensurable. I argue this is unavoidable for Kuhn given what he says about incommensurability and I investigate the consequences in relation to reflexivity, justification, and paradox for Kuhn’s account of science. I want to do this on two levels, firstly looking at different possibilities for characterising individual paradigms. I will look at some examples from ancient and early modern astronomy as here it (...) is clearest that paradigms can be characterised in different ways and that this has important consequences. I will argue in particular that Kuhn’s characterisation of the paradigm for astronomy which emerges from antiquity is favourable to his general account of the history of science, but that there is a very plausible and extremely damaging alternative. I argue that these differing characterisations generate differing, incommensurable taxonomies of the history of astronomy, with attendant “local holism,” untranslatability of key terms and issues of theory choice. If so, Kuhn then has problems with generating an adequate decision making protocol for choosing between the two paradigm characterisations. That is problematic in itself, but I also argue this problem is systemic and affects the evidence needed for Kuhn to justify his general account of the history of science. I also want to investigate the implications of differing taxonomies of the history of science at a more abstract level. Kuhn’s general theory of the history of science generates a taxonomy of the history of science, as do other theories such as those of Popper and of gradualism. If so, the incommensurability involved here, again with attendant “local holism,” untranslatability of key terms and issues of theory choice, leads to issues of paradox and justification for Kuhn’s general account of the history of science. With this broader understanding of taxonomic issues, some important Kuhn statements about scientific theories become self-referential, again generating problems of paradox and justification. (shrink)

This commentary stresses the importance of Atran's work for the development of a new cognitive anthropology, but questions both his particular use of Dawkins's “meme” model and the general usefulness of the meme model for understanding folk-taxonomies as cultural phenomena.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Clinicians’ “Folk” Taxonomies and the DSM: Pick Your PoisonG. Scott Waterman (bio)Keywordsnosology, classification, diagnosis, psychopathologyWith attention turning to the process of formulating the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V; e.g., Kendler et al. 2008), the study by Flanagan and Blashfield (2007) of the similarities and differences between clinicians’ “folk” taxonomies and psychiatry’s official one is timely, and its lessons are in need of (...) analysis. In this commentary I first address questions raised by the existence of multiple de facto taxonomies, and by the characteristics of those taxonomies themselves, before focusing attention on the DSM diagnostic system and its attributes that make acceptance by its constituencies far less than complete. Although the aim of Flanagan’s and Blashfield’s study is explicitly descriptive rather than normative, it provides an important opportunity to examine the extent to which our taxonomies serve the purposes for which they were constructed—whether by experts or by clinicians.There are certainly reasons to expect significant deviations between clinicians’ everyday taxonomies and the official one. Perhaps the most glaring reason is the fact that—even if it were desirable—no one can be familiar with the enormous number of categories codified by the DSM. On the other hand, the remarkable hegemony of the DSM—in the education and training of physicians and clinical psychologists, in clinical communication, and in the ubiquitous administrative functions of billing and coding—makes such deviations at least somewhat surprising and in need of scrutiny and explanation. The first question, however, is whether one should be concerned by the existence (surprising or otherwise) of multiple taxonomies. Flanagan and Blashfield make the compelling case that, given the high rate at which Americans seek clinical attention for psychiatric problems, the stakes are commensurately high for our efforts at categorizing those problems in valid and useful ways. And the extent to which a gulf exists between the way psychiatry and clinical psychology are written about and taught on the one hand, and conceptualized and practiced by clinicians on the other, invites a multitude of problems—among which cynicism about our disciplines may be one of the most pernicious.At least as important as their finding of only moderate correlations between clinicians’ taxonomies [End Page 271] and that of the DSM are the characteristics of clinicians’ diagnostic systems themselves. One potentially major artifact of their methodology, however, must be borne in mind: the instruction to the clinicians in their study to “[p]ut together the diagnoses that have similar treatments…” (emphasis mine). Although they cite previous work (Flanagan and Blashfield 2006) in defense of the proposition that such instruction did not unduly influence their findings, it was certainly an avoidable potential problem, which itself likely reflects the history of our clinical disciplines in which the treatment cart frequently pulled the diagnosis horse. It is, therefore, not unlikely that clinicians’ taxonomies might emphasize treatment considerations even if they had not been directed to do so. The fallacious reasoning behind such intuitively appealing practice, however, must be exposed. The implicit assumption that treatment response is a proxy for other important characteristics of illnesses is predicated on the false proposition that our treatments exert their effects via similar mechanisms across the various indications for their uses, thus allowing us to infer from such responses that what was awry in the first place among the conditions for which a given treatment is effective must be closely related. Categorizing mania and trigeminal neuralgia together by virtue of their shared responses to anticonvulsant therapy, or considering autoimmune platelet deficiencies to be closely related to abdominal trauma due to the fact that each sometimes requires splenectomy, are examples of the potential results of acting on that false premise.Another parameter on which the clinicians in the current study based their nosologies—most explicitly by the “dimensional experts”—is the “environmental” versus “biological” one. Given that a coherent dichotomy would either distinguish environmental from genetic etiological factors, or would contrast psychological (i.e., subjective or first-person) from biological (i.e., objective or third-person) manifestations of illness, a taxonomy one of whose axes purports to represent an environmental/biological continuum cannot... (shrink)

Through a selective historical, theoretical, and critical survey of the uses of the concept of scaffolding over the past 30 years, this chapter traces the development of the concept across developmental psychology, educational theory, and cognitive anthropology, and its place in the interdisciplinary field of distributed cognition from the 1990s. Offering a big-picture overview of the uses of the notion of scaffolding, it suggests three ways to taxonomise forms of scaffolding, and addresses the possible criticism that the metaphor of scaffolding (...) retains an overly individualist vision of cognition. The chapter is aimed at a broad interdisciplinary audience interested in processes of learning, teaching, and apprenticeship as they apply to the study of memory. (shrink)

I will begin by proposing a taxonomy of taxonomic positions regarding the mind–brain: localism, globalism, revisionism, and contextualism, and will go on to focus on the last position. Although some versions of contextualism have been defended by various researchers, they largely limit themselves to a version of neural contextualism: different brain regions perform different functions in different neural contexts. I will defend what I call “environmental-etiological contextualism,” according to which the psychological functions carried out by various neural regions can only (...) be identified and individuated against an environmental context or with reference to a causal history. While this idea may seem innocuous enough, it has important implications for a structure-to-function mapping in the mind and brain sciences. It entails that the same neural structures can subserve different psychological functions in different contexts, leading to crosscutting psycho-neural mappings. I will try to illustrate how this can occur with reference to recent research on episodic memory. (shrink)

Examining the rich naming systems associated with plants, this paper suggests how ethnobiological (specifically, ethnobotanical) inquiry can benefit from greater cooperation and synergy among fields concerned with naming practices, including onomastics, lexicography, cognitive anthropology, and cognitive linguistics. Our pilot-study focuses on the names of approximately one hundred heirloom vegetables culled from seed catalogues and other publications devoted to the preservation of seeds for varieties of vegetables passed down from generation to generation (e.g. Brown 1996; Bradshaw 2001; and Rakita 2003). We (...) characterize these plant names as elements in a folk-taxonomic system, arguing that the study of such native nomencla-tural schemes can productively inform research on the mapping relationships among names or words, conceptual categories, and structures in the world. In turn, research in ethnosemiotics, defined broadly as the study of native understandings of sign-systems (Hoppál 1988; Voigt 1994), stands to gain from a more extensive integration of tools developed by theorists of verbal language and of the cognitive bases for cross-culturally attested naming patterns. Interdisciplinary work of this kind promises not only to advance ethnosemiotic research, but also to help separate out what is cognitively universal from what is culturally variable in semiotic and communicative processes in general. (shrink)

What is lust? Its classification depends on where we look for its essence. Physiologically, it may appear as an appetite, urge, or drive; phenomenologically, as a desire or emotion; morally, as a sin or a life-affirming force. This chapter argues that the act of classifying lust is itself a normative choice, revealing what we take to matter in human life, whether survival and reproduction, pleasure and freedom, identity and self-expression, or social and moral order. By examining lust as drive, desire, (...) emotion, and social construction, I show how each framework highlights certain dimensions of human experience while obscuring others. The chapter also traces the tension between lust’s biological function and its subjective phenomenology: while rooted in reproduction, lust is often pursued for pleasure alone. Whether condemned as a sin or reclaimed as vitality, lust reflects the values through which we understand desire, the body, and human flourishing. (shrink)

In recent decades, anthropogenic soils have become so ubiquitous that for some authors they should be taken as the “golden spike” signaling the start of the Anthropocene. Despite their prominence, leading soil taxonomies have resisted calls to recognize them as a proper kind of soil. Such omission has importantly limited the ways in which soil practitioners can account and deal with the sociopolitical aspects embedded in soil formation. Approaching the issue from a sociomaterial perspective, this paper studies the effects of (...) such omission on the work of soil scientists working in northern Chile. By contrasting their usage of the USDA/NRCS soil typology with the realities found in the field, the work of strategic unknowing that such typologies achieve becomes evident. To challenge such situation, the paper concludes exploring the notion of emergent taxonomies, classifications that are sensitive to local configurations of materials, living beings and power out which soils emerge. (shrink)

Background: Ontologies and taxonomies are among the most important computational resources for molecular biology and bioinformatics. A series of recent papers has shown that the Gene Ontology (GO), the most prominent taxonomic resource in these fields, is marked by flaws of certain characteristic types, which flow from a failure to address basic ontological principles. As yet, no methods have been proposed which would allow ontology curators to pinpoint flawed terms or definitions in ontologies in a systematic way. Results: We present (...) computational methods that automatically identify terms and definitions which are defined in a circular or unintelligible way. We further demonstrate the potential of these methods by applying them to isolate a subset of 6001 problematic GO terms. By automatically aligning GO with other ontologies and taxonomies we were able to propose alternative synonyms and definitions for some of these problematic terms. This allows us to demonstrate that these other resources do not contain definitions superior to those supplied by GO. Conclusion: Our methods provide reliable indications of the quality of terms and definitions in ontologies and taxonomies. Further, they are well suited to assist ontology curators in drawing their attention to those terms that are ill-defined. We have further shown the limitations of ontology mapping and alignment in assisting ontology curators in rectifying problems, thus pointing to the need for manual curation. (shrink)

This paper examines ‘The Natures of Conceptual Change’, the Notre Dame lectures given by Kuhn in 1980. In particular, I aim to examine the content of these lectures which was not published before. This exegetical task will shed light on the sources of the notion of taxonomy used in these lectures for the first time with the explicit philosophical purposes. It also will shed new light on Kuhn's position regarding the causal theory of reference. Reviewing these archival materials paves the (...) way for intertextual comparisons, as Kuhn included part of these lectures in the texts published later and in the book Plurality of Worlds: an Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development. In recent years, the publication of Kuhn's archival material and the research on these texts increased in quantity and quality. Faced with this encouraging landscape, a comparative examination of the different unpublished texts is crucial to refining both our research tools on Kuhn's intellectual biography and the philosophical work inspired by his proposal. (shrink)

How should we go about developing emotion taxonomies suitable for a science of emotion? Scientific categories are supposed to be “projectable”: They must support generalizations required for the scientific practices of induction and explanation. Attempts to provide projectable emotion categories typically classify emotions in terms of a limited set of modules, but such taxonomies have had limited uptake because they arguably misrepresent the diversity of our emotional repertoire. However, more inclusive, non-modular, taxonomies also prove problematic, for they struggle to meet (...) the projectability constraint. In this paper, I explain how a developmental approach to emotion, one that utilizes the notion of progressive modularization, can help us approach emotion categorization in a more inclusive and projectable manner. (shrink)

Taxonomies and ontologies for the characterization of everyday sounds have been developed in several research fields, including auditory cognition, soundscape research, artificial hearing, sound design, and medicine. Here, we surveyed 36 of such knowledge organization systems, which we identified through a systematic literature search. To evaluate the semantic domains covered by these systems within a homogeneous framework, we introduced a comprehensive set of verbal sound descriptors, which we used to manually label the surveyed descriptor classes. We reveal that most taxonomies (...) and ontologies were developed to characterize higher-level semantic relations between sound sources in terms of the sound-generating objects and actions involved, or in terms of the environmental context. This indicates the current lack of a comprehensive ontology of everyday sounds that covers simultaneously all semantic aspects of the relation between sounds. Such an ontology may have a wide range of applications and purposes, ranging from extending our scientific knowledge of auditory processes in the real world, to developing artificial hearing systems. (shrink)

Increasingly, taxonomies are being developed and used by industry practitioners to facilitate information interoperability and retrieval. Within a single industrial domain, there exist many taxonomies that are intended for different applications. Industry specific taxonomies often represent the vocabularies that are commonly used by the practitioners. Their jobs are multi-faceted, which include checking for code and regulatory compliance. As such, it will be very desirable if industry practitioners are able to easily locate and browse regulations of interest. In practice, multiple sources (...) of government regulations exist and they are often organized and classified by the needs of the issuing agencies that enforce them rather than the needs of the communities that use them. One way to bridge these two distinct needs is to develop methods and tools that enable practitioners to browse and retrieve government regulations using their own terms and vocabularies, for example, via existing industry taxonomies. The mapping from a single taxonomy to a single regulation is a trivial keyword matching task. We examine a relatedness analysis approach for mapping a single taxonomy to multiple regulations. We then present an approach for mapping multiple taxonomies to a single regulation by measuring the relatedness of concepts. Cosine similarity, Jaccard coefficient and market basket analysis are used to measure the semantic relatedness between concepts from two different taxonomies. Preliminary evaluations of the three relatedness analysis measures are performed using examples from the civil engineering and building industry. These examples illustrate the potential benefits of regulatory usage from the mapping between various taxonomies and regulations. (shrink)

In Japan's Name Culture (1995), Herbert Plutschow noted that ‘Nomenclature is a subject to which recent scholars and thinkers have paid little attention or none at all. This is surprising because names, like other aspects of culture, contain discourses that link them to social, political, economic and religious institutions’. Southeast Asia's Muslim communities, with which the present paper is concerned, are no exception to these observations. Research carried out in the 1970s and 1980s on Arabic Islamic names by the Onomasticon (...) Arabicum group in Paris and by Richard W. Bulliet at Harvard used the compendious Arabic biographical dictionaries to explore issues relating to the social history of the medieval Middle East, conversion to Islam, and the construction of Muslim communities. Southeast Asia possesses no such convenient repertoire of biographical and onomastic data for either early or later periods. The paper therefore discusses other possible ways of studying systematically the giving, adoption and deployment of Islamic personal names in the Malay world and of using data so derived to add to our knowledge of the history and sociology of Muslim communities in the region. (shrink)

An error has been found in the cited paper; namely, Theorem 3.1 is false.

A fundamental problem with the Clark & Thornton definition of a type-1 problem (requirement 2) is identified. An alternative classical statistical formulation is proposed where a type-1 (learnable) problem corresponds to the case where the learning machine is capable of representing its statistical environment.

This book presents a new classification system for acts of wrongdoing, sanctions imposed on the people who commit those acts, and the aims these sanctions intend to achieve.

Hume seems to claim that there does not exist a valid argument that has all non-ethical sentences as premises and an ethical sentence as its conclusion. Starting with Prior, a number of counterexamples to this claim have been proposed. Unfortunately, all of these proposals are controversial. Even the most plausible have a premise that seems like it might be an ethical sentence or a conclusion that seems like it might be non-ethical. Since it is difficult to tell whether any of (...) these counterexamples are genuine, we need a taxonomy that sorts out ethical sentences from non-ethical ones. We need to know the difference between an ‘Is’ and an ‘Ought’. In the first part of the paper, I establish the need for a taxonomy. I consider some of the most influential ‘Is’–‘Ought’ derivations. These include proposals by Prior and Searle. I argue that each proposal has a premise whose status as ethical or non-ethical is difficult to determine. In the second part of the paper, I consider taxonomies proposed by Karmo and Maitzen. I argue against both taxonomies. I end with the claim that we need a taxonomy of ethical sentences and that none of the current proposals are adequate. (shrink)

In his more mature years, Kuhn became increasingly interested in the conceptual structure of conceptual taxonomies and in the meaning of kind terms. Contrary to those who claim that such an interest is evidence of a ‘linguistic turn’ he underwent to be accepted by the philosophy community of his time, in this chapter I examine the philosophical reasons that drove Kuhn to the problem of meaning, and how he attempted to solve such problems by focussing on taxonomies. Then, I analyse (...) Kuhn’s crucial shift from the ‘principle of similarities’ to the ‘principle of differentiae’, and how the latter sheds a new light on other parts of his philosophy. Finally, I discuss the problems that Kuhn’s concept of taxonomy faces. (shrink)

The challenges that government outsourcing presents for administrative law were the topic of considerable scholarly discussion in the 1990s and early 2000s, with broad agreement amongst public lawyers that outsourcing should not result in a loss of the particular kind of accountability with which administrative justice is concerned. Yet, over the past two decades, while government outsourcing has continued and evolved, very little has been done to address these challenges. This article explores the question of when non-court-based administrative justice accountability (...) mechanisms ought to extend to outsourced government functions. I argue that much of the focus of administrative lawyers to date has been on the approaches that courts should take, which has led governments and legislatures to adopt tests and taxonomies largely developed in or for the courts, which distinguish between ‘public’ and ‘private’ functions. I show that these taxonomies are not well adapted to administrative justice mechanisms outside of the courts, are not fit for purpose in many modern government outsourcing arrangements and have resulted in significant accountability gaps. I propose a different starting point for thinking about administrative justice in the modern mixed administrative state, based on normative principles as opposed to categories. (shrink)

This chapter delves into the multifaceted nature of lists, exploring their role not only as aesthetic or mnemonic tools but as profound cognitive and cultural instruments that shape human thought. Drawing on Umberto Eco’s reflections in The Infinity of Lists, the chapter argues that lists transcend their simple organization of elements and function as the foundational structure for all forms of thought, from the most basic categories to complex systems of knowledge. It asserts that lists are representations of relationships, pointing (...) to something beyond themselves, like a mirror reflecting mirrors. The chapter examines the origins of written lists in ancient Mesopotamia, illustrating their role in divination and cultural transformation, and connects them to taxonomy as a universal practice that spans across human societies. It explores analogical list-making, a process used in ancient South Asian thought for magical, explanatory, and predictive purposes, highlighting its pervasive presence across cultures. Focusing on the omnipresence of lists in South Asian philosophical literature, the chapter reveals how they structure complex systems of thought, including metaphysical and ethical concepts. It then shifts to a more abstract exploration, proposing a metaphysical definition of lists, distinguishing between sequences, categories, and taxonomies as different modes of representation. The chapter concludes by considering lists as cognitive tools that bridge material reality and transcendental truths, preparing the ground for a deeper investigation into how gnostic philosophers use lists to facilitate spiritual renunciation and access ultimate reality through the process of philosophical inquiry and negation. (shrink)

First introduced in 2015, Contributor Role Ontologies and Taxonomies (CROTs) are the most recent innovation developed to address ethical issues of scholarly authorship. By providing a standard list of roles to specify individual contributions to publications, CROTs enhance transparency and consistency about the reporting of conducted tasks, and accordingly, improve the attribution of credit and responsibilities. Although various parties such as academic journals and universities are increasingly adopting CROTs, thus far no study has evaluated them from an ethical perspective. To (...) fill this gap, this study develops an assessment instrument and subsequently analyses three major CROTs including CRediT, CRO and TaDiRAH, and provides recommendations for improving them from an ethical perspective. This study uses a bottom-up approach comprised of two literature reviews, combined with a review of non-conventional sources (i.e., forums, meeting notes, digital repositories) to collate concerns about authorship and use of CROTs, and generate candidate assessment criteria. Then with a top-down approach and using David Resnik’s 12 principles of research ethics, developed candidate assessment criteria are further analysed, and an assessment instrument consisting of 25 justified criteria is compiled. This instrument is used to identify the ethical strengths and weaknesses of CRediT, CRO and TaDiRAH. Finally, using current best practices and available technology in publication processes, recommendations are provided for further development and improvement of CROTs. Results show that CRediT satisfies more criteria than other CROTs. In relation to the attribution of credit and usability, CRediT provides unique options. However, unlike TaDiRAH that is translated into languages other than English, and CRO that has revised its roles, CRediT is only available in English and has not been updated yet. Improving CROTs benefits almost all parties involved in the development, production, or use of academic publications such as researchers, journal editors, librarians, hiring and promotion committees and funders. (shrink)

The chapter investigates the emerging of geo-ontologies from the spatial turn (Sect 1) and their general aims. The Sect. 10.1007/978-3-319-64033-4_1 of this inquiry is dedicated to show some taxonomies derived from the domain of information science and to underline the absence of a classification suitable for spreading geo-ontologies in the geographical debate. The Sect. 10.1007/978-3-319-64033-4_2 is concerned with a taxonomy for geo-ontologies grounded on some fundamental geographical distinctions. The basic idea is that such a taxonomy might best introduce geo-ontologies to (...) the geographical debate that, in turn, might deeply influence the advancement of these ontologies in terms of conceptualizations and trace gradually the guidelines for a classification, in which the development of geo-ontologies would follow all the different sub-disciplines within the same geography. (shrink)

This paper is intended to contribute to the discussion of the differential level of adoption of Big Data among research communities. Recognising the impracticality of conducting an audit across all forms and uses of Big Data, we have restricted our enquiry to one very specific form of Big Data, namely general purpose taxonomies, of which Mosaic, Acorn and Origins are examples, that rely on data from a variety of Big Data feeds. The intention of these taxonomies is to enable the (...) records of consumers and citizens held on Big Data datasets to be coded according to type of residential neighbourhood or ethno-cultural heritage without any use of questionnaires. Based on our respective experience in the academic social sciences, in government and in the design and marketing of these taxonomies, we identify the features of these classifications which appear to render them attractive or problematic to different categories of potential user or researcher depending on how the relationship is conceived. We conclude by identifying seven classifications of user or potential user who, on account of their background, current position and future career expectations, tend to respond in different ways to the opportunity to adopt these generic systems as aids for understanding social processes. (shrink)

This essay is an array of several taxonomies of values which bear on medicine. The first is a rather low-level list of types of values, meant to be adequate to observational data collection about human valuing. It proceeds to a discussion of levels of valuing so that senses of higher and lower values are articulated. Next, it offers a consideration of intrinsic versus extrinsic and of fundamental versus domestic (or mediating, enabling) values, along with the notions of a practice and (...) virtues. Finally it offers an analysis of clusters of value types along the lines of personal values, social values and professional values acting as interlocking force fields affecting the judgments, reactions and decisions of persons working in health care. In addition to the anticipated elucidation contained in the dialectic, two conclusions are intended: (1) the topic of values in medicine is staggeringly complex, and (2) a medical career is in the best sense a tragic fate in that a noble calling is doomed to many failures because of an inability to reconcile conflicts of values as much as because techniques cannot accomplish everything. (shrink)

Atran reifies Fodor's metaphor of modularity to create a truth-producing apparatus to generate a priori taxonomies or natural kinds that lock a tautology in place.