Radagast is, to put it mildly, not a fan of The Truth Laid Bear's "blog ecology". In its place, he proposes a couple of schemes for categorizing blogs which are grounded in biological science (full disclosure: SC had a sneak peek at an early draft). In fairness to TTLB, it's not clear that the rankings are meant quite as seriously as Radagast's response, but the resulting discussion brings up an interesting linguistic point.
Radagast is bothered by the categories that TTLB created because they don't match his conception of the world. However, it's not so much that the general approach to classification (something based in biology, his specialty) bothers him, but the understanding of what concepts are important to biological classification. George Lakoff addressed this issue (among many others) in a book which heavily influenced SC as an undergrad, "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things". The central theme (that's a terrible pun, if you've read the book) is an argument that humans are prone to perceiving things in ways which are friendly to their categorization schemes, and more importantly, that these categorization schemes are organized radially. Rather than the neatly hierarchical class-subclass relationships of classical logic and computer science, Lakoff claims that we organize things into prototypical examples of categories, and then grade things as being more or less like them. So a sparrow is a good example of a bird, because to our minds, it possesses many of the qualities that make something "bird-like" (feathers, wings, it actually flies, has short legs in proportion to the rest of its body, etc.). An ostrich, on the other hand, is a terrible example of a bird (the legs are enormous, it doesn't fly). It's not that an ostrich isn't a bird, it's just not the first thing that pops into mind when we think "bird". Lakoff even provides references to studies demonstrating that exact point.
Categorization schemes are rather dependent on your cultural upbringing. Lakoff contrasts our understanding of counting with people (SC forgets from where) who split their number markers into one, two, and many. But some categories are grounded in biological and psychological facts that are independent of culture -- for example, languages with small vocabularies for describing colors will tend to pick color words that maximize the differences between the meanings of the names. Black and white are always the first named color. If there's a third named color, it's always red. As the vocabulary expands, the categories start to overlap more.
Bringing this back to the issue of blog taxonomies, Radagast and the Bear have rather different conceptual schemes for organizing the world. Deciding which of the approaches to favor comes down to a choice of which of the schemes more intuitively fits our own models of the world (which is why the "ladder" model is so appealing, even though it may not be scientifically accurate). Or we might choose to try to readjust our conceptual schemes to accomodate the biological view.
Your host is ultimately inclined to take Lakoff's work metaphorically rather than literally, a point which even George Lakoff would probably smile about (given his intense focus on metaphors). While there are a lot of sound intuitions, and some solid experimental results, behind Lakoff's conceptual schemes, they don't offer much for those seeking to develop a formal theory of syntax or semantics (which Lakoff was a lot more concerned with in the '70s and early '80s). Logicians who have engaged Lakoff's approach feel that a lot of his arguments against traditional categorization and logic reflect an insufficient appreciation of just how well the classical machinery of logic can be levered to reflect his results. Lakoff is also a committed philosophical materialist and reductionist, and attempts to use this model to argue for those views, which your host neither shares nor feels are necessary to accept the points about how we categorize things. Finally, Lakoff cannot resist the temptation to inject his politics into his science (which Language Log has noted in two posts; start here). This last point is sensitive, and SC will refrain from specific comment on it, except to say that he thinks that the work which Lakoff has produced in applying this approach to politics is more reflective of Lakoff's own conceptual scheme than it is a useful exposition of the views of either American political party (or of the way in which they create and disseminate said views). Having included all these caveats, SC feels that Lakoff's ideas on the organization of the mind are important ones to deal with, and provide a very useful framework for understanding how people can look at the same situation and draw such different conclusions.
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