Taxonomy
Nodes below this root are more specific classifications that apply to subsets of the total set of classified objects.
Perhaps the most well-known and influential study of folk taxonomies is Émile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
[9] In the seventeenth century, the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, following the work of the thirteenth-century Majorcan philosopher Ramon Llull on his Ars generalis ultima, a system for procedurally generating concepts by combining a fixed set of ideas, sought to develop an alphabet of human thought.
Similarly, Ore et al.[11] provide a systematic methodology to approach taxonomy building in software engineering related topics.
Several taxonomies have been proposed in software testing research to classify techniques, tools, concepts and artifacts.
[16] Uses of taxonomy in education include: Uses of taxonomy in safety include: Citing inadequacies with current practices in listing authors of papers in medical research journals, Drummond Rennie and co-authors called in a 1997 article in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association for a radical conceptual and systematic change, to reflect the realities of multiple authorship and to buttress accountability.
[17]: 152 In 2012, several major academic and scientific publishing bodies mounted Project CRediT to develop a controlled vocabulary of contributor roles.
[17]: 151 CRediT comprises 14 specific contributor roles using the following defined terms: The taxonomy is an open standard conformiing to the OpenStand principles,[19] and is published under a Creative Commons licence.
This kind of taxonomy is called an is-a model because the specific objects are considered as instances of a concept.
Researchers reported that large populations consistently develop highly similar category systems.
It is not assigned to the concept of France (whatever that might be).” Smith's alternative to concepts as units is based on a realist orientation, when scientists make successful claims about the types of entities that exist in reality, they are referring to objectively existing entities which realist philosophers call universals or natural kinds.
Smith's main argument - with which many followers of the concept theory agree - seems to be that classes cannot be determined by introspective methods, but must be based on scientific and scholarly research.
Whether units are called concepts or universals, the problem is to decide when a thing (say a "blackbird") should be considered a natural class.
Our concepts of many birds, for example, have changed with recent development in DNA analysis and the influence of the cladistic paradigm - and have demanded new classifications.
[30] Hull (1998) continued:[26] "Two fundamentally different sorts of classification are those that reflect structural organization and those that are systematically related to historical development."
In addition, there are combined approaches (e.g., the so-called evolutionary taxonomy", which mixes historical and empiricist principles).
Michelle Bunn notes that logical partitioning uses categories which are established a priori; data is then collected and used to test the extent to which the classification system can be sustained.
[35] "Empiricism alone is not enough: a healthy advance in taxonomy depends on a sound theoretical foundation"[36]: 548 Phenetics or numerical taxonomy[37] is by contrast bottom-up classification, where the starting point is a set of items or individuals, which are classified by putting those with shared characteristics as members of a narrow class and proceeding upward.
Numerical taxonomy is an approach based solely on observable, measurable similarities and differences of the things to be classified.
One of the main schools of historical classification is cladistics, which is today dominant in biological taxonomy, but also applied to other domains.
John Stuart Mill explained the artificial nature of the Linnaean classification and suggested the following definition of a natural classification:"The Linnæan arrangement answers the purpose of making us think together of all those kinds of plants, which possess the same number of stamens and pistils; but to think of them in that manner is of little use, since we seldom have anything to affirm in common of the plants which have a given number of stamens and pistils.
"[47]: 499 Ridley (1986) provided the following definitions:[43] Stamos (2004)[48]: 138 wrote: "The fact is, modern scientists classify atoms into elements based on proton number rather than anything else because it alone is the causally privileged factor [gold is atomic number 79 in the periodic table because it has 79 protons in its nucleus].
[49] Hubert Feger (2001; numbered listing added) wrote about it:[50]: 1967–1968 "A well-known, still used, and expanding classification is Mendeleev's Table of Elements.
It can be viewed as a prototype of all taxonomies in that it satisfies the following evaluative criteria: Bursten (2020) wrote, however "Hepler-Smith, a historian of chemistry, and I, a philosopher whose work often draws on chemistry, found common ground in a shared frustration with our disciplines’ emphases on the chemical elements as the stereotypical example of a natural kind.
Compounds, complexes, reaction pathways, substrates, solutions – these were the kinds of the chemistry laboratory, and rarely if ever did they slot neatly into taxonomies in the orderly manner of classification suggested by the Periodic Table of Elements.
A focus on the rational and historical basis of the development of the Periodic Table had made the received view of chemical classification appear far more pristine, and far less interesting, than either of us believed it to be.
A major discussion in the scientific literature is whether a system that was constructed before Charles Darwin's theory of evolution can still be fruitful and reflect the development of life.
[52][53] Astronomy is a fine example on how Kuhn's (1962) theory of scientific revolutions (or paradigm shifts) influences classification.
[54] For example: Hornbostel–Sachs is a system of musical instrument classification devised by Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs, and first published in 1914.
The first edition was influenced by psychodynamic theory, The DSM-III, published in 1980[58] adopted an atheoretical, “descriptive” approach to classification[59] The system is very important for all people involved in psychiatry, whether as patients, researchers or therapists (in addition to insurance companies), but the systems is strongly criticized and has not the scientific status as many other classifications.
