Xref: utzoo comp.ai:3229 talk.philosophy.misc:1912 sci.lang:4031 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!xanth!ukma!gatech!ncsuvx!ece-csc!mcnc!rti!xyzzy!throopw From: throopw@xyzzy.UUCP (Wayne A. Throop) Newsgroups: comp.ai,talk.philosophy.misc,sci.lang Subject: Re: Categorization Message-ID: <3091@xyzzy.UUCP> Date: 27 Jan 89 16:54:55 GMT References: <681@cogsci.ucsd.EDU> <2959@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <2899@xyzzy.UUCP> <3028@xyzzy.UUCP> Organization: Data General, RTP NC. Lines: 55 > harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Stevan Harnad) > Sounds like it's > saying no category is arbitrary but all features on the basis of which > you pick them out are arbitrary. Righto. > But the trouble is that features are categories too, which makes > the whole thing sound like it's either incoherent or an arbitrary > semantic quibble. Yes, it is a semantic quibble, but no semantic quibbles are arbitrary. After all "semantics" in this case is refering to the meaning of the utterances I am making. My meanings are not arbitrary, nor can they be, for much the same reason that my categories can't be (always assuming the framework we started out with, of course... it is clearly possible to redefine "category" and "meaning" so that these things are not true, but this contradicts the original context Stevan himself set up). (And by the way, only half a smiley on that last paragraph, in case anybody was wondering. Or maybe a full smiley about the "no semantic quibbles", but I do think *this* one is not arbitrary.) As to features being categories, I disagree. Features *belong* to a category, but that doesn't stop them from being arbitrary... *they* are arbitrary, but whether or not they belong in the category "feature" is *not* arbitrary. > Yes, things are what they are irrespective of my > 'druthers, but my sorting still either does or does not depend on > something objective and invariant "out there." The point I was making was that, according to your own previous assertions about what a category *is*, a sorting that does NOT depend on something objective is not a category at all. > Hence the category he is picking out is purely > subjective, and hence arbitrary in the second sense we were discussing. > (This would NOT be like, say, ultraviolet light detection, where your > human oracle/instrument would indeed be using classical features.) No, I still think this is not possible (in the sense that it implies a self-contradiction). If the person is sorting based upon truely random criteria, then what is picked out is not a category, and if the person picking it out insists that it is, the person is either lying or mistaken. (I realize that "random" does not completely cover the "subjective" classification Stevan put forward, but the "non-random-but- subjective" portion of the classification must, as pointed out before, be reducible to classical features. -- Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it. --- Christopher Morley -- Wayne Throop !mcnc!rti!xyzzy!throopw