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From: tanner@saqqara.cis.ohio-state.edu (Mike Tanner)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Are whales fish? (was Re: Cognition vs formalizations)
Message-ID: <31266@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 13 Jan 89 21:08:04 GMT
References: <681@cogsci.ucsd.EDU> <2959@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <965@husc6.harvard.edu> <179@calmasd.GE.COM> <47459@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
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Reply-To: tanner@saqqara.cis.ohio-state.edu.UUCP (Mike Tanner)
Organization: Ohio State Univ Computer and Info Science
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In article <47459@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> Krulwich-Bruce@cs.yale.edu (Bruce Krulwich) writes:
>In article <179@calmasd.GE.COM>, wlp@calmasd (Walter L. Peterson, Jr.) writes:
>>biologist are in
>>agreement as to what creatures are members of the Class Aves.
>
>Maybe a historian on the net can describe studies showing that before the age
>of biological classification people didn't use the word "bird" to refer to a
>class of animals.

On a nearly irrelevant note --- Melville, in Moby Dick, discourses at some
length on whether or not to call whales fish.  He says that whalemen, and
pretty much everybody else, call them fish.  In fact the only people who care
whether you call them fish or not are biologists.  But whales look almost
exactly like fish, live their entire lives in the water, and without
biologists muddying things up everybody would think whales were fish.  So the
hell with biologists, whales are fish.

Is this the distinction being made here?  There are formally defined
categories and everday common sense ones.  A classification task that is hard
for one may be easy for another, and each may decide the case differently.  I
don't know what difference it makes, though.

-- mike

(tanner@cis.ohio-state.edu)