[Sigia-l] mixing apples and oranges and tomatoes s

[PeterV]

>Exactly. Doesn't this answer your own question above? Our "personal 
>taxonomies" would probably look like some seriously messy file structures 
>if you wrote them down: weird links all over the place, aliases to things 
>that jog our memories, broken links and missing files, stuff in multiple 
>categories or wrong categories. Much more chaotic than any website.

Hi Andrew,
check out Lakoff's work on how people use categories, he's a linguistic guy 
who did lots of research on categories and methaphors (book: "Women, Fire 
and Dangerous Things" - must read, really.)

It turns out (I'm definitely with Lakoff on this one) the "folk theory" of 
categories, where things belong to categories because they have some 
properties in common, isn't how we *really* use categories.

Instead, a category is often defined by a "typical example", which is then 
extended in many directions by certain rules. The book explains it a lot 
better of course, it completely shows the fallacy of traditional taxonomies.
PeterV
http://petervandijck.net