OK, but how is this natural way of dealing with entities compromised
if we drop the Linnaean categories -- if we simply say "Passeriformes"
and not "*Order* Passeriformes," "Parulidae" and not "*Family* Parulidae,"
"Icterinae" and not "*Subfamily* Icterinae," etc. Clades would still
have names in a system that did away with ranked categories, and in most
cases those names would be the same as they are now. All that is happening
here is that the artificial Linnaean *categories* are being dropped. Is
there something about these categories that speaks to the Ur-classifier in
each of us? I don't think so. I think "ordinary people" know dogs, cats,
and bears, and that all are carnivores, but don't know which familiar
groups are supposed to be "families," which are "orders," etc. I expect
that a categoryless system would be more familiar and intuitive to
civilians, because all they have to know is that a cat is a member of the
Felidae, not that a cat is a member of the Felidae, and Felidae is a
"family."

David Wright
dwright at u.washington.edu

On Mon, 5 Feb 1996, Eugene Hunn wrote:
> Clearly there is a need and justification for a technical language of
> science designed to best capture scientifically significant conceptual
> contrasts, etc. However, most of the time scientists are just being
> normal people and birders nearly always are. In that role we use
> "natural language," whichever one we learned as a child. My argument is
> that natural languages universally "digitize" reality by naming a few
> thousand discrete nominal, verbal, and adjectival categories which then are
> employed as the conceptual building blocks of phrases, sentences,
> speeches, poems, conversations, and theories. However analog the
> reality, the verbal representation of it will be in terms of discrete
> conceptual units. This worked fine for describing the significant
> biological entities of a local human habitat for hunter-gatherers and
> peasant farmers, which are temporally and spatially limited... thus
> clinal variation and evolutionary continuities are irrelevant to human
> experience in those contexts. My contention is that our brains and our
> natural languages are designed to deal with such a world, not a world of
> cladistic continuities. It is not reasonable to expect people to abandon
> those ways of thinking except in the specialized contexts of scientific
> argument.