Classification Quotes
More Classification Quotes
African continent GMs do exist; but, according to the system of racial classification, I am the first Black GM in history...it matters, and doesn't matter, all at the same time.
maurice ashley— As quoted in The United States Chess Federation profile
All known religious beliefs, whether simple or complex, present one common characteristic: they presuppose a classification of all things, real and ideal, of which men think, into two classes or opposed groups, generally designated profane and sacred.
Émile durkheim— The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1912 (translated by Joseph Ward Swain, 1965).
It is always easy to find fault with a classification. There are a hundred ways of arranging any set of objects, and something may almost always be said against the best, and in favour of the worst of them. But the merits of a classification depend on the purposes to which it is instrumental.
john stuart mill— Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865)
Science is the systematic classification of experience.
george henry lewes— The Physical Basis of Mind (1877; repr. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1891, p. 4)
I contend that the continued racial classification of Homo sapiens represents an outmoded approach to the general problem of differentiation within a species. In other words, I reject a racial classification of humans for the same reasons that I prefer not to divide into subspecies the prodigiously variable West Indian land snails that form the subject of my own research.
stephen jay gould— "Why We Should Not Name Human Races—A Biological View", p. 231
Biological classifications have two major objectives: to serve as a basis of biological generalizations in all sort of comparative studies and to serve as a key to an information storage system... Is the classification that is soundest as a basis of generalizations also most convenient for information retrieval? This, indeed, seems to have been true in most cases I have encountered.
— Ernst Mayr (1981) as cited in: C. Gnoli (2011) "Ontological foundations in knowledge organization: the theory of integrative levels applied in citation order". Scire actas. 17-1
In 1958 the classification ideas in it were felt to controversial, needing to be championed. A few years before, the {[w|classification Research Group}} had issued a memorandum proclaiming "the need for a faceted classification as the basis of all methods of information retrieval'. As part-author of this memorandum, I must now judge the claim to have been too bold, even brash.
— Brian Vickery (1975) Classification and indexing in science Preface to third edition. (First edition 1958)
It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.
jorge luis borges— "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" in Other Inquisitions (1952), as translated by Will Fitzgerald
...agronomy is this classification is divided into farm crops, crop pests, soils and fertilizers.
— University of Texas (1894, p. 20), Bulletin of the University of Texas: General series
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.
charles darwin
The ultimate goal is a comprehensive classification of what is very likely a single language family. The implications of such a classification for the origin and history of our species would, of course, be very great.
Joseph H. Greenberg— Scientist at Work: Joseph H. Greenberg; What We All Spoke When the World Was Young (February 1, 2000)
The necklace is the anchor; it's the classification of jewelry that says what the whole idea is about.
Robert Lee Morris
I think people are as individual as snowflakes, they kinda look alike but no two are the exactly the same, and all classification is the root of prejudice.
craig ferguson
In today's computer science curricula ...almost all their time is devoted to formal classification of syntactic language types, defeatist unsolvability theories, folklore about systems programming, and generally trivial fragments of "optimization of logic design" — the latter often in situations where the art of heuristic programming has far outreached the special-case "theories" so grimly taught and tested — and invocations about programming style almost sure to be outmoded before the student graduates.
marvin minsky— Turing Award Lecture: "Form and Content in Computer Science" (1969), in Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery, Volume 17, No. 2 (April 1970)
Brian Campbell Vickery was an enormously influential figure in the field of classification and information retrieval, a powerful force in the development of faceted classification and retrieval theory, and a prolific writer and researcher throughout his life.
— ISKO UK, "Professor Brian Vickery 1918 - 2009" (Jan 29, 2010)
The development of information research has increased considerably the interaction of emerging information science with other disciplines. Librarianship has traditionally had links with education and classification and has drawn ideas from logic and philosophy . But during the last fifty years new insights and methods have been derived from sociology and social psychology, from computer science, from operations research and related quantitative approaches, from communications research, from linguistics , and most recently from the new hybrids: cognitive science and artificial intelligence.
— Fifty Years of Information Progress: A Journal of Documentation Review, edited by B.C. Vickery (1994, p. 7)
Jainism has a complex classification of Jnana or knowledge, and the means of understanding reality.
— Color Science of Namokar Mantra (p. 174)
In Karnatak music, a great deal of emphasis is also placed on the Sampurna (heptatonic) scale types, Melas as a means of classifying ragas [musical scales]....the 17th century text Chaturdanda Prakasikha lists out all the possible melas which could fit into the Karnatak system of music. This 72 Melakarata system still provides the basis for classification in the Karnatak music.
Vijaya Moorthy— "Romance of the Raga" (p. 45)
