Classification System Quotes

Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier

A classification is a definition comprising a system of definitions.

One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.

Categorisation of actors has become outdated now.

Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively.

[In science any model depends on a pre-chosen taxonomy] a set of classifications into which we divide the enormous complexity of the real world... Land, labor, and capital are extremely heterogeneous aggregates, not much better than earth, air, fire, and water.

People notice all kinds of stuff sloshing around in the classification system and that makes them think it's OK to leak. it’s like tuning an Edsel. When done, your car is tuned, but it's still a really old car that may not get you where you want to go. The classification system is haunted by Cold War ghosts and demons. …All the incentives operate in the direction of keeping things secret.

There should not be a micro-managing of terminology with the Library of Congress.

It is the genus that gives the characters, and not the characters that make the genus.

Nomenclature, the other foundation of botany, should provide the names as soon as the classification is made... If the names are unknown knowledge of the things also perishes... For a single genus, a single name.

The chicken is a dinosaur. I mean, it really is. You can't argue with it, because we're the classifiers and we've classified it that way.

Labels don't mean much to me one way or another -- except when they close the minds of potential readers. I'd much rather we do away with genres and simply file everything under fiction. I know it can work -- one of my favourite record stores (Waterloo Music in Austin) simply files everything alphabetically and no one seems to have much problem finding what they're looking for.

Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground.

Should we even have the classification system? Why shouldn't these things be open? There are things you want to keep secret, like the characteristics of your latest fighter plane or something like that.

Every hope of successive generations of scholars that order might be constructed from the chaotic mess of medical nomenclature has been frustrated. Even diseases recognized in the same historical period have been given names based on characteristics that have no relation to one another, and thus no common criteria.

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.

How do we refresh our language? Why do we still use, like, a 150-year-old classification system to talk about people? It's so weird! We still call people black and white?

A river is a river, independent of whether there are other rivers nearby. In science, we call things what they are based on their attributes, not what they're next to.

It's impossible to talk without labels. "Dog" is a label, but that doesn't mean it's meaningless, nor does it mean there's no difference in a Shih Tzu and a Doberman.

If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contrevention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is a system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.

Within the last three years the amount of classified materials has doubled to 15.6 million decisions to classify documents.

Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.

Ben wished the world was organized by the Dewey decimal system. That way you'd be able to find whatever you were looking for.

The need to create a new taxonomy that isn't just applying to our own solar system will become so evident and apparent that something will come out of it. I'm sure of it, even if it's not tomorrow.

From the first dawn of life, all organic beings are found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups. This classification is evidently not arbitrary like the grouping of stars in constellations.