CATEGORIES FORMATION
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(1) |
| ID | ◀ 365 ▶ |
| Object type | Epistemology, ontology or semantics |
According to D. BÖHM and F.D. PEAT: “… categorizing involves two actions: selection and collection. According to the common latin root of these two words, select means ”to gather apart“ and collect means ”to gather together“…
- “The second phase of categorization is that some of the things that have been selected (by virtue of their difference from the background) are collected together by regarding their differences as unimportant while, of course, still regarding their common difference from the background as important” (1987, p.112).
All dogs are selected in the animal taxonomy, possibly together with cats and horses, as distinct from, let us say, marine mammals. Thereafter, we collect them in the family canidae, and more specifically in the species canis, in order to distinguish them from any other mammals.
Systemic categorization, while essentially the same, may be used in an inverse way: we abstract very general categories, that can be used to launch transdisciplinary bridges. The hypercycle, for instance, as a generalized systemic model of catalysis, may be observed as a process in numerous systems of very different classes: cyclical chemical reactions, enzymatic reactions in living systems, complex autopoiesis in social systems.
See also
Structural differential.