Classification Practices Research Articles

From the philosophy of measurement to the philosophy of classification: Generalizing the problem of coordination and historical coherentism

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, I present a framework called historical coherentism (Chang, 2004; Tal, 2016; Van fraassen 2008) and argue that it is the best epistemological framework available to tackle the problem of coordination, an epistemic conundrum that arises with every attempt to provide empirical content to scientific theories, models or statements. Second, I argue that the problem of coordination, which has so far been theorized only in the context of measurement practices (Reichenbach, 1927; Chang, 2001; Tal, 2012; Van fraassen 2008), can be generalized beyond the philosophy of measurement. Specifically, it will be shown that the problem is embodied in classificatory practices and that, consequently, historical coherentism is well suited to analyze these practices as well as metrological ones. As a case study, I look at a contemporary debate in phylogenetics, regarding the evolutionary origin of a newly identified archaeal phylum called Methanonatronarchaeia. Exploring this debate through the lens of historical coherentism provides a detailed understanding of the dynamics of the field and a foothold for critical analyses of the standard rationale used by practitioners.

Complexity and Purpose – A Pragmatic Approach to the Diversity of Archaeological Classificatory Practice and Typology

Complexity and Purpose – A Pragmatic Approach to the Diversity of Archaeological Classificatory Practice and Typology

An oak is an oak, or not? Understanding and dealing with confusion and disagreement in biological classification

Human interaction with the living world, in science and beyond, always involves classification. While it has been a long-standing scientific goal to produce a single all-purpose taxonomy of life to cater for this need, classificatory practice is often subject to confusion and disagreement, and many philosophers have advocated forms of classificatory pluralism. This entails that multiple classifications should be allowed to coexist, and that whichever classification is best, is context-dependent. In this paper, we discuss some practical consequences of classificatory pluralism, in particular with regard to how one is supposed to find the best classification for a given context. We do so by means of a case study concerning oaks, in particular the pedunculate oak (Quercus robur L.) and the sessile oak (Quercus petraea (Matt.) Liebl.), two important putative species that present several classificatory challenges; and by applying one recent philosophical framework conceptualizing classification, the so-called Grounded Functionality Account (GFA) of (natural) kinds. We show how the GFA elucidates several issues related to oak classification and gives directions to optimize classificatory practices, and discuss some implications for scientific taxonomy.

From naturalness to materiality: reimagining philosophy of scientific classification

The notion of natural kinds has been widely criticized in philosophy of science but also appears indispensable for philosophical engagement with classificatory practices. Rather than addressing this tension through a new definition of “natural kind”, this article suggests materiality as a substitute for naturalness in philosophical debates about scientific classification. It is argued that a theory of material kinds provides an alternative and more inclusive entry point for analyzing classificatory practices, which is specified through an account of “restricted malleability” of materiality and further analyzed as (1) gradual, (2) multi-dimensional, (3) scalable, (4) interactive, and (5) purpose sensitive.

Robert Boyle and Natural Kinds

AbstractThis paper studies Robert Boyle's account of kinds and classification. A number of commentators have argued that, for Boyle, classifications are inevitably the product of conventions. Others have challenged this reading, arguing that, according to Boyle, the corpuscular makeup of bodies gives rise to hard-edged natural kinds and classes. We argue that Boyle's position is more complicated than the available realist and conventionalist readings acknowledge. We argue that, according to Boyle, the individuation of kinds was to some degree the result of convention. At the same time, however, Boyle held that our classificatory practices are subject to constraints. We identify some of these constraints by turning to Boyle's discussion of the late scholastic debate about the plurality of forms, in particular the contributions of Jacopo Zabarella and Daniel Sennert. In this way, we clarify how Boyle strikes a balance between realist and conventionalist elements in his treatment of kinds.

The History of Things in Ralf Andtbacka'sWunderkammer

The History of Things in Ralf Andtbacka's<i>Wunderkammer</i>

Dalit religion

AbstractA reckoning with the question of Dalit religion is overdue. The religious worlds of that swath of the population of South Asia subject to the structural violence of “untouchability” have long been misapprehended—a consequence, in large part, of classificatory practices of the colonial and postcolonial state—as a kind of unlettered adjunct to Hinduism. This article assembles scholarly findings of recent years to foreground how Dalits themselves have constructed religious community across time and space. Dalit religion, we argue, is better understood not as a variant of Hinduism but as a critical provocation to all religion in South Asia, as well as a congeries of autonomous regional traditions that, too long obfuscated under colonial and brahminical taxonomies of religion, call out for study on their own terms.

Behavioural modernity, investigative disintegration & Rubicon expectation

‘Behavioural modernity’ isn’t what it used to be. Once conceived as an integrated package of traits demarcated by a clear archaeological signal in a specific time and place, it is now disparate, archaeologically equivocal, and temporally and spatially spread. In this paper we trace behavioural modernity’s empirical and theoretical developments over the last three decades, as surprising discoveries in the material record, as well the reappraisal of old evidence, drove increasingly sophisticated demographic, social and cultural models of behavioural modernity. We argue, however, that some approaches to identifying and categorizing modernity have not kept up with this new picture. This is due to what we term ‘Rubicon expectations’: classificatory and interpretive practices which look for or assume clear demarcations in behavioural and cultural processes. We develop a philosophical account of ‘investigative disintegration’ to capture how our understanding of behavioural modernity has changed, and how Rubicon-based practices have become inadequate. Disintegration, in the form we analyse, occurs when scientists’ conception of a phenomenon shifts sufficiently to reshape an investigation’s epistemic structure. For behavioural modernity, the explanatory weight which once lay on identifying ‘switch-points’ in the innate suite of hominin cognitive capacities, lies now in understanding the social and demographic environments that were capable of sustaining and nourishing more complex material cultures. Finally, we argue that the phenomenon itself has not disintegrated to the point that we are left with no interesting explanandum: for all its mosaic, disparate nature, there are still good reasons for behavioural modernity to retain its central place in investigation of our species' origins.

How to Incorporate Non-Epistemic Values into a Theory of Classification

Non-epistemic values play important roles in classificatory practice, such that philosophical accounts of kinds and classification should be able to accommodate them. Available accounts fail to do so, however. Our aim is to fill this lacuna by showing how non-epistemic values feature in scientific classification, and how they can be incorporated into a philosophical theory of classification and kinds. To achieve this, we present a novel account of kinds and classification (the Grounded Functionality Account), discuss examples from biological classification where non-epistemic values play decisive roles, and show how this account accommodates the role of non-epistemic values.

From measurement to classificatory practice: improving psychiatric classification independently of the opposition between symptom-based and causal approaches

The article advances a new way of thinking about classifications in general and the classification of mental disorders in particular. By applying insights from measurement practice to the context of classification, I defend a notion of epistemic accuracy that allows one to evaluate and improve classifications by comparing different classifying methods to each other. Progress in classification arises from the mutual development of classification systems and classifying methods. Based on this notion of accuracy, the article illustrates with an example how psychiatric classifications can be improved via circumscribed comparisons of different perspectives on mental disorders, without relying on complete models of their complex aetiology. When applying this strategy, the traditional opposition between symptom-based and causal approaches is of little consequence for making progress in the epistemic accuracy of psychiatric classification.

The polyphony of nature

The polyphony of nature

Non-executive female directors and earnings management using classification shifting

Prior business studies have focused on the role of non-executive female directors in constraining accruals-based earnings management with relatively less attention paid to other less risky earnings management methods. In contrast to these studies, we investigate whether non-executive female directors go beyond the neoclassical measurement and recognition-based accounting issues and pay more attention to the classification of core expenses within the income statement. We find evidence supporting the ongoing debate that classification shifting is less likely to attract the attention of either external or internal monitors. We did not find evidence that non-executive female directors are more likely to challenge managers’ opportunistic classificatory practices; rather, the results reveal a significant positive relationship between non-executive female directors and classification shifting. Finally, our finding remains robust after controlling for potential endogeneity problems and tokenism.

Identifying the Explanatory Domain of the Looping Effect: Congruent and Incongruent Feedback Mechanisms of Interactive Kinds

Abstract Ian Hacking uses the looping effect to describe how classificatory practices in the human sciences interact with the classified people. While arguably this interaction renders the affected human kinds unstable and hence different from natural kinds, realists argue that also some prototypical natural kinds are interactive and human kinds in general are stable enough to support explanations and predictions. I defend a more fine-grained realist interpretation of interactive human kinds by arguing for an explanatory domain account of the looping effect. First, I argue that knowledge of the feedback mechanisms that mediate the looping effect can supplement, and help to identify, the applicability domain over which a kind and its property variations are stably explainable. Second, by applying this account to cross-cultural case studies of psychiatric disorders, I distinguish between congruent feedback mechanisms that explain matches between classifications and kinds, and incongruent feedback mechanisms that explain mismatches. For example, congruent mechanisms maintain Western auditory experiences in schizophrenia, whereas exporting diagnostic labels inflicts incongruence by influencing local experiences. Knowledge of the mechanisms can strengthen explanatory domains, and thereby facilitate classificatory adjustments and possible interventions on psychiatric disorders.

What\u2019s my age again? Age categories as interactive kinds

This paper addresses a philosophical problem concerning the ontological status of age classification. For various purposes, people are commonly classified into categories such as “young adulthood”, “middle adulthood”, and “older adulthood”, which are defined chronologically. These age categories prima facie seem to qualify as natural kinds under a homeostatic property cluster account of natural kindhood, insofar as they capture certain biological, psychological, and social properties of people that tend to cluster together due to causal processes. However, this is challenged by the observation that age categories are historically unstable. The properties that age categories are supposed to capture are affected by healthcare and cultural developments, such that people are staying biologically, psychologically, and socially young for longer. Furthermore, the act of classifying people into age categories can bring about changes in their behaviors, which in turn alter the biological, psychological, and social properties that the categories are supposed to capture. Accordingly, I propose that age categories are best understood as interactive kinds that are influenced in dynamic ways by looping effects. I consider some implications of these looping effects for our classificatory practices concerning age, including how different disciplines may need to review the ways they define and use age categories in their inductive inferences.

The Virality of Pandemics: Reassembling the Social in the Anthropocene

Since the outbreak of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which was the first pandemic of the twenty-first century, viral epidemics, such as the avian flu, swine flu, Ebola, COVID-19, et cetera, have been appearing with increasing frequency. The adaptation of existing diseases and the emergence of novel viruses are a cause of concern and need to be situated in the context of the anthropogenic events such as deforestation, collapsing biodiversity, species extinction and the melting of polar ice caps. Can the virus make us rethink the categories of life–non-life and classificatory practices of biology? How does the trope of immunity link viral diseases and modern forms of biopower? I attempt to locate the virus as an actor in the evolution of life on the planet that sutures the domains of biological, social, political and the geological. The virus forces us to re-examine our conception of sociality, which is predicated on instituting dichotomies of human–non-human and nature–culture. The reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic may help in overcoming the inertia and helplessness in facing planetary climate crisis.

“Filmagining” Ethnicities: The Making of a Chinese Nation with Film Genres and Styles between 1940 and 1963

This article is about the movies from Chinese mainland under the production category of minority cinema (shaoshu minzu dianying), between the years 1940 and 1963. It argues that the taxonomic effort of grouping different non-Han ethnicities together into a single category of minority cinema is a sociopolitical attempt to construct, maintain and control the definition of ethnic minorities. It calls into question not what is within the film, but the classificatory practices outside of the film collectively engaged by the government, the film industry, the critics and the mass audience. Moving away from the methods of examining the representation and generic conventions of the cinema other scholarship has employed, this article emphasizes the classification system used during the time of the cinema. By comparing it with a similar classificatory problem in Western national history, using an epistemological perspective, this article criticizes the negative impact inevitably left in rhetorically driven classification systems.

Enforced Loyalties: Caste Panchayats and Caste Politics in India

Enforced Loyalties:Caste Panchayats and Caste Politics in India Anagha Ingole (bio) INTRODUCTION Loyalty is an attitude and form of behavior reflecting one's allegiance to another individual or to a group. I will be concerned entirely with loyalties to a group, and the group that is my particular focus is caste. As we normally think of it, the attitude or actions that get described as "loyal" are agentive—that is to say, they are held and done voluntarily, even when they are done unreflectively. So the word "enforced" in the title might seem, at least at first sight, to be an unusual qualifier of the term "loyalty." Yet we are surrounded by structures of sociopolitical norms and constraints that create visible or invisible enforcement mechanisms, which in turn generate loyalty. Examples abound, ranging from the crude (McCarthyite browbeating into nationalist allegiance) to the more subtle (trade union solidarities that are shaped by, for example, the stigma attached to crossing picket lines). Caste, as a longstanding and entrenched hierarchical social phenomenon in India, may seem an obvious example of such enforced loyalty. Hierarchical systems, quite generally, are preserved by those higher up in the systems, ensuring that loyalty is enforced upon all others. Caste is no exception to this. But my interest is not primarily in the enforcement of caste loyalty on these grounds, persistent though such enforcement may be, despite the relative undermining [End Page 765] of social hierarchies by the development of modern democracy in India. In fact, I will not be concerned with enforced loyalty to the caste system but rather with loyalty to particular castes by caste members; i.e., intracaste loyalty. And I will explore the role of "caste panchayats,"1 or intracaste councils, which enforce such loyalty. With them, too, the enforcement mechanisms range from the crude and violent (such as ordering honor killings of caste members for noncompliance with caste norms) to the more subtle (the use of what has come to be called the method of "social boycott"2). This enforcement of intracaste loyalty and these panchayati agencies of its enforcement present a picture of what caste itself has become in contemporary India. While making these preliminary remarks, let me present in the briefest terms a very general background of the nature of caste and caste panchayats. Since the subject (and phenomenon) of caste is one of the most complex in the social sciences, anything I say is bound to be utterly rudimentary, intended only to facilitate the points of detail and argument that the paper will develop. Caste, as is well known, is a birth-based system of social stratification. It is routinely said to have taken three forms over time. (This taxonomy has not gone without question in the scholarship on the subject, but it is useful to proceed within a short paper, as it gets things very broadly right.) The first form is caste as varna, or the fourfold division of society into the priestly class of Brahmins, the warrior class of Kshatriyas, the traders called the Vaishyas, and the manual laborers known as the Shudras. The varna is a system of graded hierarchy (with Brahmins at the top and Shudras at the bottom) based on principles of "pollution" and "purity." The Untouchables or Ati-Shudras are left out of this fourfold system and are considered to be maximally polluting. This hierarchical classification claims ancient pedigree and a scriptural basis. In the second sense, caste exists as jati, an endogamous subgroup of one or another varna. (Sometimes jatis spanned more than one varna, but this became less frequent as an indirect effect of the classificatory practices of the census introduced by British colonial [End Page 766] rule, which demanded more rigid specifications.) Jati, as a subgroup, is characterized by similar commensality practices in which intermarriage is almost always permitted, while there are complex taboos surrounding marriage and dining across jatis. Much of the enforcement of loyalty within castes is motivated to keeping things in line regarding such practices so as to preserve endogamy. A jati frequently maps onto a particular occupation. Thus, for example, in a given region there might be a jati consisting of barbers or weavers...

Making and Unmaking Populations

Statistics derives its power from classifying data and comparing the resulting distributions. In this paper, I will use two historical examples to highlight the importance of such data practices for statistical reasoning. The two examples I will explore are Franz Boas’s anthropometric studies of native American populations in the early 1890s, which laid the foundation for his later critique of the race concept, and Wilhelm Johannsen’s experiments in barley breeding, which he carried out for the Carlsberg Laboratory around the same time and which prepared the ground for his later distinction of genotype and phenotype. Both examples will show that the manipulation of data depended on complex classificatory practices: the distinction and articulation of “tribes,” “races,” and “family lines” in the case of Boas, and the selection and construction of “populations” and “pure lines” in the case of Johannsen. They also reveal a fundamental difference between data practices in the human and the life sciences: whereas the latter are relatively free to construct populations in the laboratory, the field, or on paper, the former have to rely on social categories shaped by historical accident and self-perception of the subjects under study. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Histories of Data and the Database edited by Soraya de Chadarevian and Theodore M. Porter.

Revamping the Metaphysics of Ethnobiological Classification

Ethnobiology has a long tradition of metaphysical debates about the “naturalness,” “objectivity,” “reality,” and “universality” of classifications. The work of Brent Berlin has been especially influential in developing a “convergence metaphysics” that explains cross-cultural similarities of knowledge systems through shared recognition of objective discontinuities in nature. Despite its influence on the development of the field, convergence metaphysics has largely fallen out of favor as contemporary ethnobiologists tend to emphasize the locality and diversity of classificatory practices. The aim of this article is twofold. First, I provide a historical account of the rise and fall of convergence metaphysics in ethnobiology. I show how convergence metaphysics emerged as an innovative theoretical program in the wake of the “cognitive revolution” and the “modern evolutionary synthesis” but failed to incorporate both theoretical insights and political concerns that gained prominence in the 1980s and 1990s. Second, I develop a positive proposal of how to engage with metaphysical issues in ethnobiology. By integrating traditional research on convergence of classifications with more nuanced accounts of distinctly local categories, a revamped metaphysics of ethnobiological classification can make substantial contributions to debates about ontological difference in anthropology and about the relation between applied and theoretical ethnobiology.

Specimens, slips and systems: Daniel Solander and the classification of nature at the world's first public museum, 1753-1768.

The British Museum, based in Montague House, Bloomsbury, opened its doors on 15 January 1759, as the world's first state-owned public museum. The Museum's collection mostly originated from Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), whose vast holdings were purchased by Parliament shortly after his death. The largest component of this collection was objects of natural history, including a herbarium made up of 265 bound volumes, many of which were classified according to the late seventeenth-century system of John Ray (1627-1705). The 1750s saw the emergence of Linnaean binomial nomenclature, following the publication of Carl Linnaeus' Species Plantarum (1753) and Systema Naturae (1758). In order to adopt this new system for their collections, the Trustees of the British Museum chose to employ the Swedish naturalist and former student of Linnaeus, Daniel Solander (1733-1782) to reclassify the collection. Solander was ordered to devise a new system for classifying and cataloguing Sloane's natural history collection, which would allow both Linnaeans and those who followed earlier systems to access it. Solander's work was essential for allowing the British Museum to realize its aim of becoming a public centre of learning, adapting the collection to reflect the diversity of classificatory practices which were existent by the 1760s. This task engaged Solander until 1768, when he received an offer from Joseph Banks (1743-1820) to accompany him on HMS Endeavour to the Pacific.