[comp.ai] Are whales fish?

tanner@saqqara.cis.ohio-state.edu (Mike Tanner) (01/14/89)

In article <47459@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> Krulwich-Bruce@cs.yale.edu (Bruce Krulwich) writes:
>In article <179@calmasd.GE.COM>, wlp@calmasd (Walter L. Peterson, Jr.) writes:
>>biologist are in
>>agreement as to what creatures are members of the Class Aves.
>
>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.

On a nearly irrelevant note --- Melville, in Moby Dick, discourses at some
length on whether or not to call whales fish.  He says that whalemen, and
pretty much everybody else, call them fish.  In fact the only people who care
whether you call them fish or not are biologists.  But whales look almost
exactly like fish, live their entire lives in the water, and without
biologists muddying things up everybody would think whales were fish.  So the
hell with biologists, whales are fish.

Is this the distinction being made here?  There are formally defined
categories and everday common sense ones.  A classification task that is hard
for one may be easy for another, and each may decide the case differently.  I
don't know what difference it makes, though.

-- mike

(tanner@cis.ohio-state.edu)

dave@hotlr.ATT ( C D Druitt hotlk) (01/17/89)

In article <31266@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> tanner@saqqara.cis.ohio-state.edu.UUCP (Mike Tanner) writes:
 > In article <47459@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> Krulwich-Bruce@cs.yale.edu (Bruce Krulwich) writes:
 > >In article <179@calmasd.GE.COM>, wlp@calmasd (Walter L. Peterson, Jr.) writes:
 > >>biologist are in
 > >>agreement as to what creatures are members of the Class Aves.
 > >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.
 > length on whether or not to call whales fish.  He says that whalemen, and
 > pretty much everybody else, call them fish.  In fact the only people who care
 > 
 > Is this the distinction being made here?  There are formally defined
 > categories and everday common sense ones.  A classification task that is hard

To take this sense even further: in the UK, a "bird" is an attractive
human female. In the USA, a bird is a scatalogical gesture. In the USa,
a "fish" can be a female (i.e. many fish in the sea) and a "bird" can
be an airplane or a rocket. BTW, the mouse's biological relative is the
elephant.
Seems to me that both cognitive and formal categories need to be modularized
so that, as with so many other "systems", there can be a layered or
hierarchical approach. Then the only real machine intelligence needed
would be that of determining which components of which modules should be
grouped to form a "useful" system for the task at hand. How many homunculi
would be necessary? Maybe one for each module (to maintain components) and
one to maintain the mechanism for selection and use of the modules.

Dave Druitt
(the NODES)

"I don't know and neither do you - but we can find out!"