Unexpectedly related to the problem of perfect classification is McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary. It shows that human mind is a duet where each part exhibits a different mode of attending to reality: one seeks patterns and classifies, while the other experiences reality as indivisible whole. The former is impossible to do “correctly”[0]; the latter is impossible to communicate.
(As a bit of meta, one would notice how in making this argument it itself has to use the classifying approach, but that does not defeat the point and is rather more of a pre-requisite for communicating it.)
Notably, the classifying mode was shown in other animals (as this is common to probably every creature with two eyes and a brain) to engage when seeking food or interacting with friendly creatures. This highlights its ultimate purposes—consumption and communication, not truth.
In a healthy human both parts act in tandem by selectively inhibiting each other; I believe in later sections he goes a bit into the dangers of over-prioritizing exclusively the classifying part all the time.
Due to the unattainability of comprehensive and lossless classification, presenting information in ways that allows for coexistence of different competing taxonomies (e.g., tagging) is perhaps a worthy compromise: it still serves the communication requirement, but without locking into a local optimum.
[0] I don’t recall off the top of my head exactly how Iain gets there (there is plenty of material), but similar arguments were made elsewhere—e.g., Clay Shirky’s points about the inherent lossiness of any ontology and the impossible requirement to be capable of mind reading and fortune telling, or I personally would extrapolate a point from the incompleteness theorem: we cannot pick apart and formally classify a system which we ourselves are part of in a way that is complete and provably correct.
(As a bit of meta, one would notice how in making this argument it itself has to use the classifying approach, but that does not defeat the point and is rather more of a pre-requisite for communicating it.)
Notably, the classifying mode was shown in other animals (as this is common to probably every creature with two eyes and a brain) to engage when seeking food or interacting with friendly creatures. This highlights its ultimate purposes—consumption and communication, not truth.
In a healthy human both parts act in tandem by selectively inhibiting each other; I believe in later sections he goes a bit into the dangers of over-prioritizing exclusively the classifying part all the time.
Due to the unattainability of comprehensive and lossless classification, presenting information in ways that allows for coexistence of different competing taxonomies (e.g., tagging) is perhaps a worthy compromise: it still serves the communication requirement, but without locking into a local optimum.
[0] I don’t recall off the top of my head exactly how Iain gets there (there is plenty of material), but similar arguments were made elsewhere—e.g., Clay Shirky’s points about the inherent lossiness of any ontology and the impossible requirement to be capable of mind reading and fortune telling, or I personally would extrapolate a point from the incompleteness theorem: we cannot pick apart and formally classify a system which we ourselves are part of in a way that is complete and provably correct.