ej wrote:
I hope you will forgive this being a bit off subject, but this is about
the smartest list of people I know. I came across a list in the past while
studying OO methdology stuff. The list was trying to make the point of the
problem classification systems often run into (i.e., often things belong in
more than one group simultaneously).
The list reads something like this:
1. Beasts that belong to the king
2. Great beasts
3. Furry beasts
4. Unicorns and other magical beasts.
5. Beasts with four hooves.
...
Footnote (even further off-topic)-
cf. the preface to 'The Order of Things', Michel Foucault:
This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter
that
shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my
thought
- our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our
geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes
with
which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things,
and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse
our
age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes
a 'certain Chinese encyclopedia' in which it is written that
'animals are
divided into:
(a) belonging to the Emperor,
(b) embalmed,
(c) tame,
(d) sucking pigs,
(e) sirens,
(f) fabulous,
(g) stray dogs,
(h) included in the present classification,
(i) frenzied,
(j) innumerable,
(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
(l) et cetera,
(m) having just broken the water pitcher,
(n) that from a long way off look like flies'.
....The central category of animals 'included in the present
classification',
with its explicit reference to paradoxes we are familiar with, is
indication
enough that we shall never succeed in defining a stable relation of
contained
to container between each of these categories and that which
includes them all: if all the animals divided up here can be placed
without
exception in one of the divisions of this list, then aren't all the
other
divisions to be found in that one division too? And then again, in what
space would that single, inclusive division have its existence?
Absurdity
destroys the *and* of the enumeration by making impossible the *in*
where
the things enumerated would be divided up...
....I use that word [operating-table] in two superimposed senses: the
nickel-plated, rubbery table swathed in white, glittering beneath a
glass
sun devouring all shadow...; and also a table, a
tabula, that enables thought to operate upon the entities of our world,
to
put them in order, to divide them into classes, to group them according
to names that designate their similarities and their differences - the
table
upon which, since the beginning of time, language has intersected
space...
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No, I didn't type that out ;-):
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_cul...erFoucault.pdf
Gerard
