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number of our exiting examples of things and the indefinite number of things we shall encounter in the future" (Barnes, Bloor, and Henry 1996, 55). While this is a useful general model, it does not have the power to trace exactly how changes are made, this has been the great breakthrough of Rosch's prototype theory discussed below. |
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Starting as well from a reading of Durkheim and Mauss, Mary Douglas observed a similar kind of mechanism for the reification of social categories: "How a system of knowledge gets off the ground is the same as the problem of how any collective good is created. . . . Communities do not grow up into little institutions and these do not grow into big ones by any continuous process. For a convention to turn into a legitimate social institution it needs a parallel cognitive convention to sustain it" (Douglas 1986, 46). For her, classification systems of all types are at base social institutions that reflect and describe the way things are in the social world. Again prefiguring Latour, she argues: |
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Before it can perform its entropy-reducing work, the incipient institution needs some stabilizing principle to stop its premature demise. That stabilizing principle is the naturalization of social classifications. There needs to be an analogy by which the formal structure of a crucial set of social relations is found in the physical world, or in the supernatural world, or in eternity, anywhere, so long as it is not seen as a socially contrived arrangement. When the analogy is applied back and forth from one set of social relations to another, and from these back to nature, its recurring formal structure becomes easily recognized and endowed with self-validating truth. (Douglas 1986, 48) |
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Douglas and Bloor here draw attention to a key feature of classification systems, that they grow out of and are maintained by social institutions. Building on this broad generalization, our approach in this book is to offer fine-grained analyses of the nature of information infrastructures such as classification systems and thus to demonstrate how they simultaneously represent the world "out there," the organizational context of their application (an issue discussed in Dean 1979) and the political and social roots of that context. We suggest that at this finer grain we detect rather a coconstruction of nature and society than a projection of the social onto the natural. |
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A classic divide among kinds of classification systemsand one that can lead us to this kind of coconstructionis that drawn by Taylor, who distinguishes between Aristotelian classification and prototype classifications. Experimental psychologist Eleanor Rosch (1978) |
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