Individual Things - The Way We Divide

[Doobah47]

Originally Posted by No0ne

So, if a female has a chararistic that is distinctly a opposite chararistic of the male sex, it's very likly that the "fe"male" sex would not be categorized by the same lable as "male"

Yet females and males tend to be categorized as a specific organism (cat or hydrangea); it is possible for dna to be exchanged between plant and animal (consumption/digestion), and also possible for reproduction to occur between different categories of organism (?). If this is so then why categorize individual organisms via characterization? We could end the endless categories in language and communicate with emotional responses to stimuli conveyed by language irrelevant to obvious objective differences.

One could say "liquid motion through penetrable tunnels in cooperative places" in place of "walking along a road". Poetic explanations communicating the emotion which an individual perceives. It is clear that the easier option is to use the simplest vocabulary in an explanation thus the audience can imagine and understand the fundamental parts of the idea communicated, but surely we miss the creative, intuitive and emotional expression when communicating with obviously objective sentences - the audience oblivious to relevant perceptions/feelings of the 'expressor'. It takes conceivable metaphor to express the somewhat ineffable notion of emotional relevance, yet I am sure that all language - objective and subjective - is simply a system of conceivable metaphors; thus the poetic is justified in place of the obvious, in that both fulfill identical premises in the composition of linguistic expression.

[GoshisDead]

A great example of the strangeness of modern categorization is that tomato is a fruit...
I'd love to see a different brand of categorization thus different thinking...

Sorry, but this is diving into linguistics, for which i have an abiding love. So here is an interesting example of semantic domain classification, which I ran across while working with an endangered language in the Sierra Nevadas of Eastern California.

In most western society and languages we divide the realm of the word cat into its various subcategories big cats, house cats, wild cats, and what have you. We can prototypically categorize a cat species which we have never seen before by certain catlike characteristics set out by the linguistic prototype [cat] (note) for iteresting research on semantic domains and categorization read Derek Bickerton or George Lakoff.

The Eastern Mono have a morpheme that is used in the creation of 5 words.
-bichi
Pahabichi - Bear
Wihabichi - Lynx
Tu:kabichi - bobcat
u:nu:'bichi - Whiteman
uinuibichi - tiny cute furry thing

Yet their word for house cat is borrowed from English Kidi' (kitty) and their word for Mountain Lion is Ehoka. The question there lies, why do the two wildcat species and bear share the same morphology while Mountain lion doesn't? To the old Mono generation that never went to school, it is laughable to group a mountain lion and a bobcat in the same domain. But a Bear and a bobcat are grouped together. The introduction of the house cat explanation is simple. They didn't have house cats before white people showed up.

The reason for the categorization as it is in Eastern Mono is the course fur and the stocky build of bears, bobcats, lynxes, and cute little furry things. Mountain lions are long lean and graceful with short sleek fur. As for whitemen, the morpheme U:nu:'u means scary, and the -bichi part came from thick beards that the miners and frontiersmen sported.

What I'm getting at with this example is, simply that the process of categorization is natural, the categorization itself is arbitrary. Of course having only 3 species of "cat" in a language population's given area is influential on the imminent catness of anything. The environment in which a language evolves is paramount to the parameters in which categorization can be applied, but within those parameters the categorization may be left to the caprice of the cultural conscious

[boagie]

Originally Posted by Didymos Thomas

Are there different things, or differences in the way we divide some thing?

No matter how apparently similar, we can find differences between two things, and no matter how apparently different, we can find similarities between any two things.
Even though we might identify objective similarities and differences, they do not justify making any particular distinction between kinds of things. For every category or name, we could just as easily had some other way to categorize and name things and still be as consistent and explanatory.

Didymos Thomas,

What is it about the qualities that these catagories represent that troubles you, the process itself is something that cannot be done without. What criteria do you fancy for say the catagory of animal species? I am unsure of your intent here, what would be the motivation behind recatagorizing the things of this world?

[No0ne]

Originally Posted by boagie

Didymos Thomas,

What is it about the qualities that these categories represent that troubles you, the process itself is something that cannot be done without. What criteria do you fancy for say the catagory of animal species? I am unsure of your intent here, what would be the motivation behind recatagorizing the things of this world?

Time to time thing's should be updated, to be more effective in the function that they carry out.

I have a dog, it's breed is a toy poodle, it's white.

I have a human friend, he's Asian, he's yellow...

See how some thing's in the categorization of a person or thing seems needless?

Anyways, it seems like the only motivation that there could be, is to create a new communication system that is more effective and more efficient, and less time consuming in the act of relaying information to another person, without the chance of the other person mis-perceiving what you had said.

It seems humanity hasn't upgraded the speed or effectiveness on a hole language scale for a long time, just like a network for computer's there is always room for a new "patch" to increase the speed of communication.

So if one word, was made from 1,000 word's, you wouldn't need to say 1,000 word's you would only have to say that one word, as long as everyone knew those 1,000 word's, so when you speak it, they see it how you and every one els See's it.

So if you if you call something, by another name that people don't known, it would cause great mis-perception, and that's the main reason why English should not be remade, but just modified for advanced user's such as philosopher's

A great example is a episode of South Park, where Starven Marven go's to the planet Marklar, where everyone speaks using only the word marklar to communicate with one another.
(also opposites are portrayed in the same episode, Cathy lee Giffard has all the food in a house and is "super" fat, and the Ethiopians have no food, no house, and are super skinny, and opposite color clothing)

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Well in my opinion, thing's should be categorized, with great simplicity in mind...

[GoshisDead]

Anyways, it seems like the only motivation that there could be, is to create a new communication system that is more effective and more efficient, and less time consuming in the act of relaying information to another person, without the chance of the other person mis-perceiving what you had said.

There have been countless attempts to do this either by creating an artificial language in its communicatory ideal of perfection such as Esperanto, or from necessity when two trade groups meet somewhat more naturally (pidgeons). The same thing happens every time the artificial and normally very concise language is taught to a generation as their primary or birth language. That generation grammaticizes it, adds descriptive and divergent vocabulary, uses slang, creates full prosodic and pragmatic systems, in essence they jump starts a more natural language. It seems that human communication as it is genetically wired within us, is sloppy, context dependent, and somewhat arbitrary.

[nameless]

Originally Posted by Didymos Thomas

For every category or name, we could just as easily had some other way to categorize and name things and still be as consistent and explanatory.

Not 'could' but 'are', not 'had' but 'have'.
I think thats called 'having' (being) different and unique Perspectives, all of us.