Categories as icons [1]
Categories in data [2]
Two systems of categorization in folk biology [21]
"In order to emerge and flourish, the mind needs to make sense of its environment by continuously investing data ... with meaning. Mental life is thus the result of a successful reaction to a primary horror vacui semantici; meaningless ... chaos threatens to tear the Self asunder, to drown it in an alienating otherness perceived by the Self as nothingness, and this primordial dread of annihilation urges the Self to go on filling any semantically empty space with whatever meaning the Self can muster, as successfully as the cluster of contextual constraints, affordances, and the development of culture permit ..." Luciano Floridi [3] page 7.
I am sitting at a 'desk' made from two 6' tables end to end. I am in an attached garage converted into an 'office.' This office is in one corner of the larger 'room' containing eight 'bookshelves' and the cluttered remains of what was once a large house. My wife calls this my 'man cave.' I could continue describing this space in detail but I want to draw attention to the quoted words. These words are categories, terms in which one separates the world into objects or things. There is a big debate in metaphysics about whether 'ordinary objects' exist. [4] Within my sight I see hundreds of objects, I can give a name to most of them but usually clump them together into categories, with odds and ends put into a general category called 'stuff.' It is generally believed that humans can recall from 5 to 9 different concepts from working memory simultaneously. [5] This could be seen as a limitation, but also as advantageous:
Easier memory search
Comparing categories using analogies
Exploring and expanding categories through metaphor.
The need to clump objects into categories is necessary to human thought and happens continuously.
It must be noted that mental classification uses the whole human sensorium, not just the visual system. There are several processes involved in dealing with categories:
The learning of new sets of categories.
The assignment of an object into a particular category. This includes what could be termed a null category, what I call 'stuff.'
The splitting or joining of known categories into sub or supra-categories.
The creation of new categories given a novel set of objects.
So far, all of the psychological tests I've seen deal with the second process, an arbitrary set of categories is created, a training period in which one learns the categories, and then one is tested on the skills of assignment.
Currently, there are three theories about the cognitive process of category assignment:
Exemplar Theory - the idea is that the human mind stores images of objects in a category like a set of flashcards that are flipped through to match and assign an object. Exemplars use long-term memory. This is one of the earliest theories of categories, and it is assumed that all types of categorization use this process. There is evidence that whole scenes but not the objects within the scenes are encoded in the brain and remembered when shown a set of scenes that includes the remembered one. [6] On the other hand, a great deal of detail can be accessed from these globally coded scenes. [7] It is not currently known how this is done.
Prototype Theory - This was first proposed by the psychologist Eleanor Roch in 1973. [8] Prototypes are abstract concepts of categories based on some similarity measure between objects. [9] These can be 'natural' categories, built-in and intrinsic to human cognition, or learned (created) abstractions. Roch has shown evidence that color and shape form natural categories. [10] Prototypes come from linguistic and psychological standpoints.
Category rules - This is a learning theory about cognitive brain processes in working memory. More open-ended and flexible than prototypes. Category rules suggest multiple modules involved in learning categories, implicit: unconscious, and nonverbal in humans or explicit rule-based computation that is spread out over several regions of the brain. In humans, verbal ability is a useful but not a necessary feature. Thus explicit processes can be studied in animals. [11]
It is not that any of the competing theories are superior to others but rather to what extent these theories support how the mind handles categories. Since category rules are more of a generalization of prototypes, there are two questions here:
Are exemplars or prototypes used?
Is there a single or multiple learning modules used?
Answers to these questions have come from animal studies [12]
Martial eagle in flight [13]
Vervet monkey [14]
Categories are so related to human language that it is hard to separate the two. Animals must also divide and clump the world and a category associates itself with a behavior and/or a call. For instance, a vervet monkey (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) calls an alarm to warn the troop when it spots a martial eagle (Polemaetus bellicosus) in the sky but not another bird or another large bird like a vulture. To give so many false calls would waste valuable foraging time. Thus the monkey must categorize the eagle as a danger and other birds as not. How is this done? Researchers have compared human subjects, Macaques (Macaca Mulatta,) and also pigeons. Two types of learning strategies were tested.
information-integration (II). This is essentially stimulus-response learning. I get sick eating a red bug and will never eat a red bug again.
rule-based (RB).
These two strategies were compared against exemplar and prototype category tasks. Results show that prototype categorization shows a stronger signal across all species than exemplar yet exemplar is still being used. The current theory is that exemplar categorization is for the most general categories and for recognizing hierarchies and relatives. Testing for II vs RB, pigeons don't use RB but Macaques do, although they take longer to learn than humans. This suggests an evolutionary path. [15] [16]
Human language seems to form a divide between us and other animals. A similar divide exists among humans: cultures that have invented writing and those that have not. There are many indigenous cultures today that don't have a writing system in their language. I have found it difficult to find an appropriate term with the word 'literate' in it and an individual may be able to write quite well in some colonial language but not in their ethnic one because it doesn't have a writing system. Categories not codified by Western science or from nonwriting cultures are termed 'folk' categories, again a diminutive or even insulting term. One actively studied folk category is so-called folk biology. [17]
The Greek philosopher Theophrastus (371-287 B.C.) left two books on botany, one on classification, a written record of Greek folk botany first published in Latin in 1483. [18] This was the first written record of folk botany. It included around 550 different plants. Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist who in 1735 published Systema Naturae, the first modern classification of plants. He was familiar with Theophrastus and with Sammish folk biology, in addition to his collections of Swedish plants. Linnaeus accepted the idea that each category constituted creatures created uniquely by God. European explorers were soon bringing back thousands of specimens of different plants and animals so the idea of unique creation became difficult to accept. Darwin's solution to species origins revolutionized biology. He spent many years talking to various animal breeders in England, the folk biologists of their day. [19] The evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr did fieldwork studying bird species in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands between 1927 and 1931. He was struck by how much the native people knew about bird species and how well it matched his systematic study. This gave him insight into the idea of distance between species and ideas as to how this distance is created. [20] Science has returned to folk biology for knowledge and inspiration many times in its history.
Folk biology across the world has some universal commonalities: [21]
Life forms are categorized as a taxonomy, a ranked hierarchy.
Most known life forms are included, not just the economically important ones.
Mostly monophyletic categories, the level of single species genera but with some exceptions.
Native speakers can classify objects that don't have a term for them in their language. This has been shown with colors and living creatures. [9] [22]
"The many hundreds of distinctive groupings that do present themselves un ambiguously for human recognition are, of course, themselves the result of the processes of biological evolution. The human observer, psychologically endowed with innate capacities for categorization, almost spontaneously perceives the readily recognizable patterns inherent in the ways that evolution has worked. This unconscious recognition of nature's plan ultimately emerges as the cognitive structure that we know as a society's system of ethnobiological classification."
Brent Berlin [21]
Human beings seem to be hardwired to recognize the living from the non-living. Babies as young as 8 months see self-moving objects as alive and have expectations of these objects being solid They show interest when shown that an object that seemed alive is hollow inside. [23] This is done by measuring the sucking reflex. Usually, it is a constant rate but when something surprising or interesting gets their attention, the rate increases. There is evidence that humans are born with sets of cognitive modules, assumptions about the world, and the cognitive tools to manipulate these assumptions. These include the concept of numbers, counting, the ability to add and take away, [24] assumptions about the relationships of objects in 3D space, and the motion of objects in the world. [25] In addition, there must be modules for navigating space, those somehow connected with the hypothalamus and what is currently called the cognitive map. [26] This is believed to be the basis of the beliefs in folk knowledge. All through folk biology is this idea of vitalism, of a life force. This idea lasted in science up to the 1930s with the merging of evolutionary theory with genetics. [27] [28] Today there is still no exact definition of what life is. We know that there is a definite gap between living and non-living matter, this knowledge is inherent, but what that gap is and how it came to be is still a major mystery.
Folk knowledge has been given a new name: Indigenous Science. At first, I was suspicious of the term. Is this some well-meaning attempt that will dilute science? I've changed my mind completely during the writing of this article. Indigenous Science is a study of how humans interact with their environment based on knowledge that is almost 30,000 years old. Since it is a science it is shared but with a different balance of power; not exploited or mined, or just taken.
The human mind's capacity to find patterns and divide the world into categories is both a blessing and a curse. There are two serious mental pathologies associated with categorization:
when everything is connected - paranoia
when nothing is connected - depression
It has been a quest in mathematics and science to abstract and then offload the process of categorization to computers. This is not to say that humans are not still part of the process, this is a tool, not a replacement. This all hinges on the idea of distance. What does it mean that there is a distance between categories? And how does one measure this distance? [29] This will be the theme of my next article...
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