[Sigcr-l] question on The Power To Tag 12|03

[Simon Spero]

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 12:45 AM, Simon Spero <sesuncedu at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I still think that folksonomy distracts us from the importance of  "folk taxonomies" (as contrasted with  "scientific taxonomies"). Using Hayek's terms, Folk taxonomies are  Kosmos , or grown order; scientific taxonomies are Taxis, or made order. By virtue of being culturally evolved, Folk taxonomies tend to be a very good match with human cognitive constraints, including  the primacy of  the basic level terms and a tendency to be much shallower than artificially designed orderings (I seem to remember reading that they typically had a  maximum depth of  7±2 , but I forgot to mark the spot. Stupid non-greppable dead trees).

Ah, l'esprit d'escalier!  Berlin et. al. ought to have been the one I
was thinking of, but I think I was thinking of Brown et al, which
extended the original work to non-biological classification.

The maximum depth seems to be 5, which would make sense for a system
evolved for use by groups some of whose members would naturally be
-2s.

Berlin, B., Breedlove, D. E., and Raven, P. H. (1966). Folk taxonomies
and biological classification. Science, 154(3746):273-275. URL:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/154/3746/273

Brown, C. H., Kolar, J., Torrey, B. J., Trươong-Quang, T., & Volkman,
P. (1976). Some General Principles of Biological and Non-Biological
Folk Classification. American Ethnologist, 3(1),  73-85. URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/643667