Krulwich-Bruce@cs.yale.edu (Bruce Krulwich) (01/13/89)
In article <179@calmasd.GE.COM>, wlp@calmasd (Walter L. Peterson, Jr.) writes: >Actually, the categorization of penguins and all other birds is quite >easy. Unlike most other taxonomic categories, biologist are in >agreement as to what creatures are members of the Class Aves. All >animals that have feathers are birds and all birds have feathers. >This is not just a "cultural bias" nor is it an arbitrary rule. Maybe a historian on the net can describe studies showing that before the age of biological classification people didn't use the word "bird" to refer to a class of animals. Once biologists decided what a bird was, viola! everyone started to use this wonderful new catagory in their conversations. I'm just waiting for sociologists to define the catagory "friend," so that I can invite some friends to lunch. The point behind the sarcasm is that formal classifications decided by people may mirror the classifications that people use, but are a completely different phenomenon. Just because biologists have an "easy" classification of animals doesn't mean that the catagories that our minds use are the same, or that the process of classification is the same. Lakoff discusses this in detail in his book (WF&DT), and describes studies that show the similarities and differences between formal and cognitive catagories. Bruce Krulwich