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section below, we frame our reading by briefly describing some of the theories about classification that have informed cognitive and social science discussions of classification. |
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Kinds of Classification in Theories About Classification |
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Within the field of the sociology of science, the Edinburgh School has developed a rich analysis of scientific classification. In many ways its analysis of classification goes back to Durkheim and Mauss's classic "De quelques formes primitives de classification: contribution à l'étude des représentations collectives." Durkheim and Mauss had made the strong claim that classifications of the natural world in "primitive" societies directly reflected kinship structure in the sense that they projected the microcosm of social organization onto the macrocosm of the worldsocial tools were used for describing the natural world. They concluded that "the history of scientific classification is one by which the element of social affect has become progressively weaker, leaving more place for the reflective thought of individuals" (Durkheim and Mauss 1969, 88). David Bloor (1982) produced a rereading of Durkheim and Mauss that both defended them against the attacks on the validity of their analysis and extended their work to scientific classifications in seventeenth-century physics. He claimed that Boyle and Newton were producing classifications of entities in the world that reproduced their theological and political beliefs; in his words, both sides in the debate ''were arranging the fundamental laws and classifications of their natural knowledge in a way that artfully aligned them with their social goals" (Bloor 1982, 290). This position prefigures the mechanism Latour (1993) gives for the projection of social categories out into nature and then their reimportation in the process of political debates ("if they are out there in the world then they must be real and so we must model our society accordingly''). Bloor used firstly Hesse's network model of classifications and more recently (Barnes, Bloor, and Henry 1996) he and colleagues have offered a finitist model. Common to both philosophical descriptions is the position that no category stands alonewhen a new member is added to a class, this has ramifications for the class and the system of which it is part. Just as Lakotos (1976) argued about mathematical objects, the new exemplar can change the whole nature of the system. Specific classification choices are "underdetermined and indeterminate. It will emerge as we decide how to develop the analogy between the finite |
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