Xref: utzoo comp.ai:3058 talk.philosophy.misc:1813 sci.lang:3899 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!ncar!husc6!endor!reiter From: reiter@endor.harvard.edu (Ehud Reiter) Newsgroups: comp.ai,talk.philosophy.misc,sci.lang Subject: Re: Categorization Message-ID: <967@husc6.harvard.edu> Date: 12 Jan 89 02:19:43 GMT References: <2980@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <24080@cornell.UUCP> Sender: news@husc6.harvard.edu Reply-To: reiter@harvard.UUCP (Ehud Reiter) Organization: Aiken Computation Lab Harvard, Cambridge, MA Lines: 42 In article <24080@cornell.UUCP> turney@svax.cs.cornell.edu (Jenn Turney) writes: >(Another case: wouldn't you say a panda was a pretty typical bear, even >though pandas are in the raccoon family, not the bear family?) This is a good example of the ambiguity of biological classifications. According to Stephen O'Brien, "The Ancestry of the Giant Panda", SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, Nov 87, the biology of the situation is as follows: Physiology: - red pandas have some physiological similarities to racoons - giant pandas have physiological similarities to both racoons and bears Evolutionary History: - 35 million years ago, the common ancestor of red pandas and racoons split from the common ancestor of giant pandas and bears - 30 millions years ago, red pandas split from racoons - 20 million years ago, giant pandas split from bears This is the *biology*. Now, how about *language*. Should we define the class "racoon" to include giant pandas and red pandas, as Turney suggests? Or, should we define "racoon" to include red pandas, and "bear" to include giant pandas? Or should we should we put red pandas and giant pandas into their own class, "panda"? As language users, the choice is ours - but whatever choice we make, it will be something that has to be taught, not something that is intuitively obvious. And if another culture makes a different choice than we do, we would not be justified in saying they were "wrong" and we were "right". As one last caution, Lakoff points out that if we decide to classify strictly according to evolutionary history, we would have to put crocodiles in the class "bird", because crocodiles and robins are much closer in terms of evolutionary history than crocodiles and lizards. This would be a shame, because it seems to me that the class (crocodile, robin, hawk, penguin ...) is much less useful to a language user than the class (robin, hawk, penguin ...) - and I would be so bold as to argue that an even more useful class might be just (robin, hawk, ...) (i.e. leaving out penguins, ostriches, emus, etc). Ehud Reiter reiter@harvard (ARPA,BITNET,UUCP) reiter@harvard.harvard.EDU (new ARPA)