Quotes About Classification

Back in the 1950s, mathematician Anatole Rapoport offered a four-valued logic which I often find useful, classifying statements as true, false, indeterminate (at this date) and meaningless (forever indeterminate, because no experience can either prove them or refute them.)

In Zadeh's math, we can say "This animal belongs 90% to the fish family and 10% to the amphibian family." "This animal belongs 60% to the ape family and 40% to the hominid family." See? Just like the Coke can contains 60 % coke and 40% air. I told you I wouldn't leave us wandering in the dark with the Fundamentalists . . .

If by some miracle I have managed to make sense out of this issue, where physicists themselves seem to have trouble understanding one another, the basic point of Copenhagenism seems to be similar to my own Nietzschean-existentialist view that the nonverbal or preverbal world never contained meters or kilograms or ergs of energy or photons or good or evil or beauty or meaning until primate nervous systems (human minds) put them there as systems of classification.

To be sure about nonsense he had to be able to classify it, assign it to a family tree of liberal nonsense, humanist-humanitarian nonsense, academic nonsense, Protestant nonsense, Freudian nonsense and so on.

The result was several distinct species, to each of which scientists have assigned a pompous Latin name.

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.

Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify.

Metadata liberates us, liberates knowledge.

Why continue to tolerate a kind of armchair skepticism that has everything to do with scientistic propaganda and nothing at all to do with honest, rigorously open-minded collection, classification, and theory building, that is, with real science and real humanistic inquiry?

Peeps are eight and under, pez are nine to eleven, and marshmallows are twelve to fourteen.

Guide Note: Technically, there were no aliens on the ship, just space travellers. As soon as the 'alien's' identity is revealed we can abandon that classification.

The small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify we give the name of knowledge.

HOMICIDE, n. The slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he fell by one kind or another -- the classification is for advantage of the lawyers.

People want to classify and say, 'OK, this is a gangster film.' 'This is a Western.' 'This is a... ' You know? It's easy to classify and it makes people feel comfortable, but it doesn't matter, it doesn't really matter.

If you look at how people use the term 'western,' you can only conclude that it means a movie that has big hats and horses. And if you really want to sound like you've been thinking, then you'll use a term like 'genre.' But all the hell it seems to mean is big hats and horses. Which is not all that deeply analytical.

It seems we will continue to have problems with this classification and it may be because it comes under the heading of creation rather than preservation.

When you make a film, everyone wants to define it.

I don't want to give you the opportunity to find a box to put me in, figure it out later. When the records come out song by song, you'll hear it and get to determine how you want to classify me.

Many people believe that determining who is 'black' is rather easy, a task simplified by the administration of the one-drop rule. Under the one-drop rule, any discernible African ancestry stamps a person as 'black.'

In teaching, I wanted to offer a general pharmacology course based on chemical principles, biochemical classification and mathematical modelling. In the event I achieved neither of my ambitions.

Margaret noticed that he was one of the many men who classify women into those you talk to and those with whom words merely impede the way.

The French government classifies books as an "essential good," along with electricity, bread, and water.

There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not.

that when the Platypus was discovered, scientists said it was a paradox. But Pirsig's point was it was never a paradox or an oddity. It didn't make sense only to the scientists because they viewed the nature of animals according to their own classification, when nature did not have any.