I’ve written before about Wikipedia categories, using the example of a brand of toothpaste, and this post is an attempt to understand them a bit better. And to ask the …
Category: taxonomy
George Lakoff is famous (according to Wikipedia) for the “conceptual metaphor theory”, which is that people are influenced by the metaphors they use.
Intrigued by this claim, I read the short book Metaphors We Live By (1980), by Lakoff and co-author Mark Johnson. Sure enough, …
A recent book on Alfred Kinsey (Donna Drucker, The Classification of Sex, University of Pittsburgh Press) describes Kinsey’s great innovation as taxonomic.
…By ordering individuals on a scale of 0-6 instead of a heterosexual-bisexual-homosexual triad model (or even a binary heterosexual-homosexual model), Kinsey shifted