By our nature, to the degree that we are knowledgeable, we classify. This can be easily demonstrated by trying to not classify. Say something, anything. Gossip. Say that so-and-so is a *%^##@! Ah hah!! You have classified! Talk about how you are going to get to or from your home after this session. By selecting a route and establishing a plan, you have classified. With each choice, you are faced with subsequent choices. Such options to lead to others. Understanding of such relationships is the beginning of knowledge. The more detailed such knowledge becomes, the more nuanced and useful it is.
My mentor, Dr. Dell Allen, made a presentation at a local university at my request. Though retired, he had devoted much of his professorial career to the understanding of classification. The presentation was titled "Classification, the Superscience". His point was that unless and until you classified something, you really didn't understand it. He asked the roughly ninety students present how many of them had learned about classification, about taxonomies of their subject areas. The answer was that none of them had learned anything about this important task either in their major areas of study or their general studies.
Without classification, you have chaos. I created a small series of guidelines on the subject as available on the web. The thing is, knowledge and classification are very closely related. As an example, scientists that study thought processes use the example of a person's entry into a fast food store. How is it that one knows how to make use of such a facility? Once you step inside, how do you know to go to the counter? How do you know which part of the counter to go up to? How do you know how an order is made? How do you know what to do once you have ordered? There are many hidden issues that are so deeply embedded in the situation that you don't even give them a thought.
Expertise in large part lies in the ability to recognize a situation in the first place. Place a novice in a meadow in the mountains and he or she will notice conditions on a very elementary level when compared to a forester or an plant ecologist or a geologist. Each of them sees a very different situation, though situated in the same meadow. Understanding of the situation in each case is couched in classification.
This is not just a passive issue, but active as well. The degree to which you can comprehend the implications of a situation you find yourself defines your use as a care giver. In some cases, recognition patterns may demand certain actions as a means of averting danger and disaster. Conditions in a mountain meadow may presage an earthquake, a fire, many kinds of weather-related threats, snakebites, altercations and battles, and biological risks. By the same token, they mean nothing more than the outline of a beautiful summer day, to be enjoyed and remembered.
The classification challenge is firmly embedded in questions of health and disease. Classification occurs at untold levels of importance, including the need to classify whoever is doing the classifying. In many health questionnaires, people are asked "has a doctor told you that you have diabetes"? Much of the importance of the answer can only be understood by dissecting further the nature of any doctor in question. Of course, you will want to know if it is a medical doctor or not. This is important to know, a consideration independent of many other facts. It may not always be the case that a medical doctor is the best source of medical classification, as a PhD virologist or immunologist may have more valid insights in a particular case. If the person was a medical doctor, was that person a specialist or a general practitioner? Was he or she particularly well-versed in diabetes and as related conditions? What data was used? Importantly, what data was not used? Was the doctor acting in a clinical capacity or was the comment made "at the opera" or in the context of another kind of social event?
This is how knowledge, at how least deep knowledge, is gained, continually burrowing down into greater levels of detail and specificity. In the intersection between science and society, there needs to be an effective match between such representations of reality and reality itself. If this is not the case, we will continue to bump up into physical and natural realities, to our discomfort and danger. This leads to the question of regulation. There are those that say that regulation it is inappropriate and counterproductive. What is called regulation in a political context may be an ugly affair, but that is because it is done poorly, not being informed of the detailed requirements of our situation.
Ask any scientist, particularly the naturalists and biologists. They will say that life itself and regulation are not too far afield from one another. We need to make a better go of it. Father Adam is reported in the beginnings of Genesis in the Bible to have been an ardent classifier, taking it upon himself to provide names for every living thing. An understanding of the ever-more-detailed task of classification lays bare an important factor, the need to classify not just names, but everything else that is of concern to the natural world.
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