In praise of classifications

Prompted by a reading of Nicholas Humphrey’s essay at reference 1.

Humphrey offers an attractive argument concerning the selective value of an ability to classify things. In brief, a human who is quickly able, for example, to identify a tiger or a fruit which may be safely eaten is more apt to survive to reproduce, to be selected in the jargon of evolution. He points in support to the speed with which young children learn how to do this. With all the alphabet books helping them on their way. Young children are mostly very good, for example, at picking cats out of a very mixed heap of animals, quite possibly on the basis of just one named example.

He adds three further wrinkles. First, evolution arranges it that we enjoy classification, much in the same way that it arranges for us to enjoy food and to enjoy sex. Further encouragement, certainly for the conscious human. Second, we have the notion of a property, where, ideally, things either have the property or they do not or the property takes some fairly small number of categorical values. Furry would be an example of the first sort of property and number of legs would an example of the second sort. With the third wrinkle of having an ‘everything else’ category, because while most animals have either no legs, two, four, six or eight legs there are some which have too many to conveniently count, animals like millipedes and centipedes. It seems quite possible that the growing brain learns to use properties, before language is available to organise and teach them.

One result of evolution arranging for people to take pleasure in classification is that classification takes on a life of its own, possibly moving away from, of growing out of its adaptive function. We do it for its own sake. Think, for example, of all the many people over the years who have taken great pleasure from organising and reorganising their stamps into albums. An activity which, at least superficially, has no adaptive value at all.

Activity which also illustrates the pleasure to be had from variety within identity. The pleasure taken in all the different animals that, to use a word from Macbeth, are clept by the name of dog. We get a bit bored when they are all the same, but take an interest in the ones that push the envelope out a bit. 

He regards the passion for collecting as an extension of the passion for classifying. Collecting as a vehicle for classifying. We organise our collection on organising properties or principles, in the case of stamps perhaps country of origin and year of first issue.

Humphrey then goes on to look at the function of this variety in art, but we do not need to go that far for present purposes.

Properties, hierarchies and networks

Properties can be used to organise things into hierarchies and networks. So if A is a node in our tree or network, the inferior node B might be defined as that subset of A for which property C equals D.

I only observe here that we stray into slightly deeper water, in that there are going to be lots of different ways of doing this, some more useful or helpful than others. One can, for example first organise things by whether they have fur or not, then by the number of legs and lastly by whether they have horns or not. Or you could use the same three properties in a different order. One might arrive at the same answer in the end, but you will get different intermediate nodes and different terminal orders.

Some more examples

The pleasure to be had from identifying other parts that an actor in a television drama that one is watching has played before. Before in the sense of time of watching if not of time of acting - a fussy way of saying that one might not watch television dramas in the order in which they were made. Another case of variety within identity: we have the same person appearing in a variety of roles, perhaps to the extent of coming in 57 varieties, in the way of Heinz.

A small child came to BH’s attention who had trouble, when visiting his grandparents, with the notion that you can only watch your favourite programme at the time at which it is broadcast. The child has, perhaps, assimilated the television to the class of cupboard, the cupboard to which you go when you want something. The notion of waiting for some particular time is much more complicated and takes rather more explaining.

Then we have classifications of disease, work on which across the globe amounting to a substantial industry in its own right, but essential tools in the fight against disease. So we have the international classification of disease, outlined at reference 3 and its relative from the United States, the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. Important, inter alia, when it comes to making insurance claims regarding same.

Then, lastly, there was the three volume CODOT classification of occupation here in the UK, the work of the statisticians of what was then called the Department of Employment Group, then headquartered in St. James’ Square. With the first of quite a few mentions in these pages being found at reference 5.

Conclusions

I find the notion that evolution has treated classification in this way attractive. But I do wonder what the devil’s advocate might have to say about it all.

PS: something similar to the drift of classification away from its adaptive roots is quite common in today’s real world. So we decide that learning is a good thing and invent exams to test learning. But then people target the exams without regard to the learning. With an example from government computer project inspections of the first decade of this century – then known as Gateway reviews – being the risk register. The management people decided that projects would be less likely to fail if they operated a risk register. So, surprise, surprise, all the projects sprouted Excel workbooks called ‘Project Risk Register’ which they showed to the inspectors. Checking that these registers were actually used in the way intended was another matter.

References

Reference 1: The illusion of beauty – Nicholas Humphrey – 1973.

Reference 2: Seeing red – a study in consciousness – Nicholas Humphrey – 2006. A book which has been noticed in these pages in the past.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Classification_of_Diseases.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders.

Reference 5: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2010/02/quartets.html.