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From: roberts@cognos.uucp (Robert Stanley)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: natural kinds
Message-ID: <1203@cognos.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 29-Jul-87 20:34:27 EDT
Article-I.D.: cognos.1203
Posted: Wed Jul 29 20:34:27 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 1-Aug-87 11:46:53 EDT
References: <1526@botter.cs.vu.nl>
Reply-To: roberts@cognos.UUCP (Robert Stanley)
Distribution: world
Organization: Cognos Inc., Ottawa, Canada
Lines: 51
Summary: when is a house not a house

In article <1526@botter.cs.vu.nl> hansw@cs.vu.nl (Hans Weigand) writes:

> (3) anthropic/functional kinds, existing by virtue of readiness_to_hand
>     Examples: chair, cup, house, knife, game

>....  Thus we may recognize an Eskimo iglo, and an African pile-dwelling both
>as "houses".  I think it is not so much the form (iconicity) that matters,
>but rather that we feel that, when we would live in Greenland
>(resp. the jungle), we would naturally appreciate or use these things
>as houses too (to protect us against cold, dangers)....

This raises some very interesting points, most particularly the fact that
anthropic kinds cannot generally have simple definitions.  A very young child
gets away with calling a crude drawing or sand castle a 'house', but an
architect or construction engineer sees a house in much more specific terms.
In fact, we are entering the realms of the working vocabulary, and what is the
lowest common denominator which allows for completely successful transfer
between two disparate working sets.

Perhaps a strong example will serve.  Kenya became an independent nation in
1964, and was faced with the problem of codifying laws, and deciding on
official languages.  The two numerically superior tribal groupings were the Luo
and the Kikuyu, each with their own language, but colonial administration had
been exclusively English (at least in writing), and the standard interlingua of
the whole East African coast was Swahili (an Arabic-based patois).  To further
complicate the issue, the very powerful, nomadic tribe of the Masai (with their
own language) had do be taken into account.

English and Swahili both were adopted as official languages, and a determined
effort made to create a formal body of law in both.  In the Swahili version is
a formal definition of house which runs to some 96 pages of text!  Why?
Because the term house has a whole slew of legal meanings in English common
law, on which Kenya's laws are based, which are totally alien to many of the
Kenyan tribes, especially the nomadic Masai.  Therefore, each and every such
legal referent has to be precisely defined.

I leave as an exercise to the reader.......

I am not sure that house or any other cultural artifact can be called a natural
object unless its cultural matrix is expressly defined as part of the object's
name.  Or that all objects in a given grouping are stated to exist within an
explicitly defined cultural context.  I am absolutely sure that when I say
house and an Eskimo says igloo we are not talking about the same thing at all.
In fact the only common denominator appears to be shelter from the elements in
the winter months, albeit those are different for the two of us.

-- 
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