What does classification have to do with knowledge?

We classify things so that we can group an action, activity, event or object that share the same qualities or characteristics. The way we use the concept of our knowledge together with the problems representing knowledge are shown through information systems. However, there is a big distinction between observing, perceiving, or even describing things in comparison with truly knowing them. In order to know requires facts about the object and context in which the object and process exists. Once a concept is understood or if there is a relationship among them a classification is then implied so that there is a representation of what is known and is thus useful in communication and in generating a fresh cycle of exploration, comparison, and theorizing. A good use of classification is, in the same a theory does, connecting concepts in a useful structure. If well imputed, a classification can be like a theory; descriptive, explanatory and maybe even elegant. The construction of our AOK occurs from divergent ways of knowing. Our observations of the world, our emotions, our intuitions and reasoning, our faith, memories, imaginations, and our languages all illustrates how we gain knowledge.

There are many approaches when looking upon the construction of the foundation of classification schemes. Different classification process requires different goals, and each type of classification scheme has different structural properties as well as different strength and weaknesses in terms of knowledge representation and knowledge discovery. I will discuss the representative sample of some common approaches and structures.

When classifying things we can interpret it in two different ways; we assume it’s either by you of for you. A company ‘3M’ has distinct ways of referring to a tape according to the country it sells. In Brazil, it is referred as “durex” which derivatives from “durar”, meaning duration. However, english speakers names it as tape because it is rolled up, also english speakers don’t usually use the word duration since it is more common to say something lasts longer. Another example for which companies might change the name of it’s products is due to the difference in the denotation of the word when literally translated into another language. For example: in English, the word durex is a trademarked name for condoms that are made in the United States, while in portuguese the word durex means scotch tape. Spanish people names it as cinta, while, for brazilians the word cinta, when literally translated means belt. With that being said we can see that the way we name things is based on our language.  

Depending on it’s context or culture we classify objects with a different category or meaning. For example: for me a buddha has a function only for decoration. However, for others it might not have a function of decoration due to it’s religion context. With that said we can observe that we have different words because we believe in different systems.

Classification can be based on observations, a great exemplar is Carl Linnaeus; who aimed to classify all the elements of the natural world. His developed the Species Plantarum and Systema Naturae, which classified the elements into kingdom/phylum/class/order/family/genus/species). Every small distinguishing features counted, whether if it was weight, colour, density, texture, shape, symmetry, and even if it consisted of mammary glands. It was due to this classification that Linnaeus came to a conclusion in which he decided to classify whales as mammals instead of fish. In order to create this classification Linnaeus had to use his imagination, it is also likely that intuition leaded him to some of his categories, and that emotion, memory and faith were all involved in the process.  

What Does Classification Have to Do with Knowledge?

Humans categorize things naturally as a way of memorization and a way of learning. These categories allow us to make sense of the things around us, and allow us to add new items to our schemas through our previous experiences. We, as humans, start by cramming new things into categories, and eventually start cramming categories onto new things. Categorization is everywhere in our lives, we find it in the form of classes, peoples, hobbies, schools, colors, shapes, textures, everything word we use to describe anything has a category associated with it that we created in our own minds, generating our own schemas.
My cousin had a child about a year ago whom I met for the first time last christmas, while he was just learning how to talk. Upon meeting the child (Chasen) I noticed something very interesting. It first happened when we were outside on a porch, he pointed to the sun and said "sun!" I was impressed that he was, at such a young age, able to point and identify things in the way that he did. However, later, as it was getting dark, we went inside, I turned on the light and he immediately points at it, looks at me and says, proudly: "sun!" Chasen had developed a category he referred to as "sun" meaning bright yellow circle above. Unconsciously, Chasen was developing categories constantly as new words were learned. With limited vocabulary, children tend to fit more things into smaller categories that those more experienced with language and the world around us would think ridiculous, such as calling a ceiling light a sun. This suggests that we enter this world with no categories, or rather, one single category containing everything we experience. As time goes on, however, and we learn and experience more things, creating more categories and shrinking our original category of "unknown." An example of this phenomenon is when I taught little Chasen the word "light." The introduction of this new word applied to what had previously been in his schema of "sun" shrunk his "sun" schema and added a new schema of what a "light" is.
Classification happens whether we want it to or not. Without classification, we cannot possibly hope to understand or remember anything about our world. The process of learning itself is categorization. If you see a chair, you know it is a chair. Chairs normally have four legs, though they can have more or less, they have a spot to sit (or else it could be a table), and normally have a back rest (or else it could be a stool). Just upon seeing a single chair, you developed a category for them, and this is the same with everything else you see. It is simply impossible to look at something without categorization, as any single word used to describe that thing automatically puts it into a category, whether that category is "chair" or "sun" or "blue thing." Classification is necessary, it gives us the ability to learn and understand, while also allowing us to communicate through common concepts.

Anoushka G.: What does classification have to do with knowledge?

Classification is a very important tool for us as human beings. Classification allows us to generalise and remember everything, so that every time we walk into a room, we are not mystified by "the thing with four legs and a flat, shiny surface." We know, from our previous experience, from the list of categories in our brain, that if it has a flat, shiny surface and four legs, that this is a table. Therefore, through our memory and sense perception (both ways of knowing), we have been able to classify that this is a table. In real life, this happens all the time: we use our ways of knowing, or our areas of knowledge (AOKs), through which we have already created categories, in order to work our way around the world. 

In this sense, classification is good. It helps us figure out things much faster than if we had to analyse things from scratch every time we encountered a new room, a new table, or something more complex. Classification, in this sense, is very useful to us as humans. An example that our textbooks gives us is of the Indian journalist, Manini Chatterjee. Her job is interesting, because she interacts with people within several different contexts. She has to use her different AOKs and power of categorisation when she interviews people. For example, when she interviewed a man in India about political parties, she had to use her knowledge of political parties to understand that when the man was talking about kerosene lamps, he was referring to the bleak future of the party, whose symbol was a kerosene lamp. The power of categorisation and past knowledge allowed her to categorise this man’s dialogue as an opinion on the political party’s future, not a discourse on the rising lamp oil prices. Similarly, when we did the classification activity, we had to think about how we could classify objects. Most of the classification of objects came from our past experience in either learning about the classification of living organisms (biology, an AOK) or classifying them by what they represented to us, like its function, or what it looked like (WOK). It is interesting to note, however, that none of us used WOKs such as sense perception, apart from sight, to identify this object. Therefore, from our past experience, we were also categorising the idea of categorising - through its appearance, like we do when we walk into a room ( a WOK), or function, like in biology (or an AOK) - which limited the ways in which we could categorise these objects.

However, classification is not always a good thing. I was reading a book recently, called What is the What by Dave Eggers. In the opening scene of this book, a man who is a refugee from Sudan and now lives in America opens his door to a woman who asks to use his phone, only to find out that he is getting robbed. The woman locks herself into his room, and her accomplice walks in to watch the young man while they rob him. When the young man resists, the woman’s accomplice begins to hurt him, both of them classify each other as different things - this scene has a plethora of classification. The accomplice tries several times to stop the young man without violence. He looks at his dark skin, and since he also identifies as an African-American, he decides to call the young man his brother, and ask him to let them rob him, because they are basically brothers. However, when the young man doesn’t stop, the accomplice begins to show his more prejudiced side by categorising this man as a Nigerian (because he is black, he is from Africa, and all men that are from Africa are from Nigeria), and yells and kicks him repeatedly in order to stop him from interfering. He hurts him several times, and immediately, this young man who has been through so much is afraid only now, because he knows this man is enjoying himself, and when people enjoy injuring others, they often abandon any care. However, the negative type of categorisation that is going on here is being carried out by the woman’s accomplice. He assumes that this black male is from Africa, and that if he is from Africa, he is from Nigeria. This type of classification is known as prejudice, and it has led to problematic things like racism and sexism. This is because this type of classification does not allow for the broadening of our world view, and it limits our perspective to only a handful of experiences. We will never know any different types of women if we assume that all women are silly and hysterical. We will never know anything else about this man’s culture if we assume that he is Nigerian, and refuse to hear the rest of his story, because if we’ve heard one, we’ve heard it all. 

But what do we do? Do we completely stop classifying, in order to prevent such bigotry? I don’t think it is possible to function very well without categorisation. As the textbook mentions, classification is good, but we should also be careful about running into logical fallacies like hasty generalisation. In order to be aware of the world around us, and build better knowledge, with more variety, and not be bigoted, we must learn to think critically when we classify. If we see a woman on TV, and immediately discredit her because she must be crazy, we have to stop ourselves and think about why we would classify something in a certain way. We have to ask ourselves: could my classification be fallacious? Am I classifying it this way because of my past experience, and my past experience only? In this way, we not only avoid generalising too much, and we also become better thinkers, because we are aware of our own limitations, and we can use that as fodder for improvement.

What does classification have to do with knowledge?

Classification is an absolute essential to knowledge. It's the way we organize the world around us, the way we group things together and set them apart. It's an absolute necessity with which we define and validate the things we know. But more than that, classification is the basis of shared knowledge.

Take for example, classifications within ToK. In the world of Theory of Knowledge, the two main categories for classification are Ways of Knowing and Areas of Knowledge. The latter is made up of language, reason, sense perception, memory, imagination, intuition, emotions, and faith. Areas of Knowledge are more subject-based: the Arts, Mathematics, Human Sciences, etc. And so we ask, what are the purpose of these classifications? Both WoK and AoK is a concept we created, "a tool for thought, nothing more." (ToK Textbook, pg 216) These classifications were created for a specific reason, to "help share our thoughts and to build and reflect upon knowledge together."

In science, we classify compounds by their type of bonding: metallic, ionic and molecular/network covalent. How do we define the type of bonding? Through a certain set of characteristics. What does this do for us? It gives us specific traits to look for, so that we can identify the type of bonding from physical features and we can understand which compounds are similar and why. Not only is this beneficial when examining unknown substances, as anyone in chemistry can tell you, type of bonding tells us a bunch of other traits like whether it will have a high or low boiling point. These classifications were created so it would be easier to share this knowledge. Imagine if they did not exist: the traits would still be there but there would be no way to pair compounds together in terms of bonding. The conversation between chemists would become infinitely and unnecessarily complex and digressive.

But what happens when we're left up to create our own classifications? In a recent activity in the last ToK class, our teacher laid out an array of objects, ranging from a stuffed giraffe to a meat thermometer. The challenge? To arrange the objects into groups. The rules were that 1. every object has to have a group, 2. no object should be in more than one group and 3. every group has to have more than one object. The type of classifications we each created varied: personally, our group decided to classify it depending on the bottom's surface shape. We had circle, semi-circle, rectangle, etc. What was the most fascinating thing was that barely any people went about it by looking at touch or noise. And while the objects were together in one group were defined as complete opposites in the other, most of us relied on sight. Which was when our teacher asked us to imagine what it would be like if third graders did this activity. They would have been all over it, taking out the matches from the matchbox, the box out of the matchbox case. As an example, she took off what I had seen as a toy horse's holster, which turned out to be a hair band. I was so surprised because I had not seen that at all. At the same time, since the hair band was blue, when she took it off, a classmate exclaimed, "it's not blue anymore". His classifications were no longer valid because of a simple change that meant the object did not fit the characteristics of the group. The change of perspective completely changed whether something fit belonged in a category.

As I said earlier, classification is an essential to knowledge. It helps organize things we know and understand about the world around us in a way that makes it much easier to share with others. But we have to be careful in assuming the way we classify things is universal. Classifications are often based on one's own learning experience. Few people in the world use the tools of AoK and WoK to examine knowledge together. The way we classify our knowledge varies to a great extent. Sometimes, it's something as innocuous as comparing juniors to third grader's way of assigning categories for a variety of objects. Sometimes, it's something as harmful as gender stereotypes and roles, where, for example, things are classified as "masculine" or "feminine". These things change immensely depending on who's classifying them, from the way they were taught to describe and group things to their gender identity. But in any case, it's an inevitable human habit to place things together, to make sense of the things we know about our reality by putting them together.

What does classification have to do with knowledge?

Our knowledge is classified. Our brain will attempt to organize everything we perceive in life, sort our knowledge into what we call categories. The act of classification happens all the time: we classify places we are, people we meet, objects with which we interact.

Through our ways of knowing (WOK), we construct our areas of knowledge. When we gain any piece of knowledge, we categorize it and this is what makes life possible.

In real life, if I had to treat every situation I encounter as a new and unknown one, I wouldn’t be able to do 1% of the things I currently do. When I learn a new strategy to solve a math problem, my brain automatically stores it in the mathematics AOK, so the next time I encounter a similar problem, I already know the protocol to solve it. Further than this, we use categorization in a daily basis. When you see people in suits sitting around a table, inside an office’s room, you deduce it is a business meeting so you already know how to proceed. If you had to re-analyze the situation, it would take a longer amount of time. Thus, human beings generalize. Generalization is a fundamental aspect to quickly understand the world around you. Humans crave to categorize things, as a way to simplify the world and keep moving forward in life.

However, this can be a problem. Personally, one of the most challenging intellectual experiences I had until now was to categorize objects without given categories. In TOK, when I had to group objects, I couldn’t accept the idea of not having given groups. There were countless possibilities for the categorization and as my brain tried to complete the demanded task of grouping everything, it simply couldn’t.

Humans tend to progressively get better at categorization, as they acquire life experience and get exposed to more and more situation; the groups inside people’s brain expand. An interesting thought regarding categorization, more specifically, is that people hate when a generalization is broken. This is very similar to the TOK activity. If you have deduced something by looking at the majority, your brain automatically classifies the unlooked as part of the majority. This creates a classification for the certain thing and makes it easier for you to understand the thing. However, if you find a specific case that opposes your categorizing idea, then, you will realize you will need to rethink your entire group. This is why generalization works so well for us, as soon as we classify a piece of knowledge (ex. Observation of majority), we can create a general idea for the group and move on.

Even though no classification system is perfect, it is the only thing that allows us to act the way we do. In school, we solve math problems easily, in the office; the employee knows how to act in a meeting. This is why we always find it harder to do something for the first time. When they talk about being a risk-taker, it really means taking the risk to classify a piece of unknown knowledge.

        

What does classification have to do with knowledge?

On the 18th of March, we, as a TOK class, did a very intriguing activity. The assignment seemed fairly simple, but, in truth, it really was not. In groups of three, the activity given was to classify objects that were in the front of the class on a desk. Objects included stuffed animals, flashlights and even matches. The guidelines we were given were simple: Every object should be in a classification group, every group had to have at least two objects and no object could belong to more than one group. As you might have guessed, people in the class struggled to make an effective classification system. My group and I wanted to do some kind of fun and different classification for different objects. Easier said then done. However, the most interesting part of this activity was not the struggle each group was going through, but the end results. All groups had different classifications, and if they had the same one, different objects would be in that group for different people. This was fascinating, at least for me. How could a simple activity transform into a such complicated "mess"? As we had learned before, different people have different schemas, thus having different ways of perceiving the world, which would, most likely, lead us, humans, to different ways of classifying things. So, in this very basic classification activity we did in class, we could easily see how classification could link with knowledge, as it relates to previous ways of knowing, such as perception.

In our books, there is a main idea about the ways of knowing and the areas of knowledge. The idea states that the ways of knowing, such as memory and faith, are all interconnected as lots of times you use them at the same time. Also, that the ways of knowing help us decipher the areas of knowledge, like mathematics and social sciences, and vice-versa.  So, when we say that classification is a demonstration of our ways of knowing, as it shows how different people would group things, it uses our areas of knowledge to do so. Hence, classifications are a direct representation of ways of knowing and areas of knowledge, and so have a lot to do with knowledge itself.

In one of my past subject areas there was a very clear example of classification. Last year I took Biology, where classification is key to the subject as a whole. For every living thing there are categories, sub-categories, sub-sub categories, etc. I remember really clearly the mnemonic that was used to remember the classification of living things: Kings Play Chess On Fine Grass Silk (KPCOFGS). Which stands for the following: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species. Each of them are sub categories of living organisms and within them there are more categories. It is in fact very neat.

Classification is also around all over the world today. Also, there is a lack of consensus in some classifications around the globe as well. For instance, when categorizing terrorism and terrorists, many different states may consider different organisations and people to be terrorists. There is such lack of agreement with the definition that the biggest diplomatic organization in the world, the UN, has no official definition for terrorism.

All in all, we can see how classification affects our daily lives, touching current discussions and different areas and ways of knowledge. After all the explanation given in this blog, we can affirm that there has to be at least a bit in common between classification and knowledge. Thus, classification has to do with knowledge.

What does classification have to do with knowledge?

We construct our areas of knowledge using our own ways of knowing. Our emotions, observations, faiths, deduction, intuition and language provide of ways of knowing. How we classify our world around is unique to every being. The big question we need to ask ourselves is how accurate are the categories we create? In categorising we will generally use observation, social convention and judgements but how can we now that these are most precise? Human sciences and history study the way that human construct their categories. Both areas of knowledge will deal with "social construct", which is the classification that we create socially or culturally, but that we do not observe. Categories carries implications of how we think and act in the world. Take for example gender and race classifications, both of them involve social power. Scientists say that categorisation of human differences have attached humans to certain judgements and emotions. The world "nigger" was used to classify black people, however the word itself carried much more power than a simple classification, it carried judgements and prejudice. Classification schemes have properties that enable representation and reflect knowledge of the object being classified. The subject that is master at classifications is Science (biology), more specifically the biologist Carl Linnaeus who aimed to classify all the elements in the natural world. He made a system of classification which consisted of: domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, specie. The ways of knowing that Linnaeus used to classify the natural world is significant, he must have used knowledge in different forms such as: reason, dedication, observations, intuitions and language. We will classify things into categories that seem reasonable to what we know. Each person has unique knowledge, therefore classification systems and schemes will vary from person to person. In the activity we did in class each group had to classify a series of objects according to what they thought as the best fit. From group to group the results varied a lot. One group decided to classify the objects by function, while the other thought that it was best to classify it by weights or by material. The schema, mindset, of each person would influence how they would categorise and express their knowledge about the object. Culture also plays a fundamental role in classification systems, in the brazilian culture wooden stick is used to stir coffee, while in the american culture this wooden stick is most likely to be seen as a popsicle stick since spoons are used to stir coffee. If you told a brazilian to put the wooden stick under a category he could classify it by function and say that its function is to stir, while the american would say its function is to hold a popsicle. Categories will vary from culture to culture, since the way we view and object will differ. This is when shared and personal knowledge come in. We live in a world were categorisation is used all the times to make things easier and simpler. For example; when we walk in a supermarket all the sections of the supermarket are organised into categories so the consumer can go to the section that most interest him/her. However, classification is only true when logic is used in the process of determining its class.

What does classification have to do with knowledge?

    Classification has every bit to do with knowledge. The way I see it, if you see an object that you have never seen before (lets say object x), but you see that object x is put into a category (lets say category y), then you can infer that object x has common traits with all the other objects in category y. Depending in the object and category, you could tell what the object does, what it is used for, where it is found, or how it was made, all without knowing exactly what the object was.
    This type of knowledge that is learned from categories is most easily seen in science. Science has tons of categories like plants and animals, mammals and reptiles, or the different categories for elements, and so on and so forth. If a new element is found, it can be analysed for characteristics that would best categorize this new element. Once it is roughly categorized, this new element could be tested to better categorize it. This, to me, is a byproduct of categorization. That the more categorize we create and the more detailed they are, the faster we can categorize new objects because we know exactly what to look for and/or test to accurately say "yes it can be part of this category but no it cant be considered that...". Every subject area has categories but not every subject area categorizes in the same way (yeah duh -_-). What I mean by that is sometimes objects are created to fit a category, not the category is made to fit a set of objects. I see visual arts being a subject area where objects are made to fit categories. In the sciences, we create categories to fit sets of things, but in the visual arts, the categories are already there, and the art that is created is made to fit a category. Art is categorized by the medium of the art, the style, the era, the meaning of the art, and so on. With the exception of the era categorization, an artist will choose what medium they use, what style that display, what emotion (happy sad) is conveyed, the colors or lack there of, etc. before they even create the art. However, only the artist who makes the art does this. Viewers of the art then categorize the art based on what they think. This is why some pieces of art can have a given element be considered as part of two different categories (while technically that given element of the art is only part of one category) . The only information viewers of the art have to go off of to categorize is the art itself. I like to think of literature as having this same categorizing "limitations". In a way literature and art are similar in that a writer writes to fit criteria and not write something and then explains that the writing expresses x, y, and z. That job is up to the readers. Also like art the categorizing "limitations", could come from, for example, differences in tone of a text. One sentence could have a sad tone while the whole text has a happy tone, based on symbolism. But the personality and emotion that the creators put into the works of both art and literature is overlooked. This is because we don't have universal categories of the personal experiences and  emotions of each and every person to use to categorize each and every persons creations.
    In the classification activity we did in class, we had to put a set of objects into categories. It sounded simple enough. However, not all the groups had the same way of categorizing the objects. This is mostly due to the different schema each person has. The schema of each person would influence how they categorize objects. But I think there is another reason how and why the groups categorized the objects differently. I think that objects are categorized in ways that best express the knowledge that the person who created the category wants us to learn. We can all agree that different objects can be put into more than one group and still be correct in terms of the rules of each group. For example, a horse is both an animal and a mammal. This is why we have Venn diagrams, because one object can be categorized possibly hundreds of ways (not to be confused with how art or literature can be considered two different categories). But usually you see objects categorized in one set a a time, and I think that's because by putting an object into a category emphasizes the trait of the object that would put it into that set. Back to the group activity, some groups chose to express the purpose that some of the objects had as a way to categorize them. So, two of the groups had entertainment as one of their categories. By putting the objects used for entertainment into a category, we could tell that they categorized the objects by there use. Likewise, some of the groups had religion as one of their categories. Again we can tell that they were categorizing by objects that are used for or represent religion. If you wanted to categorize objects by how they are used, you wouldn't sort the objects by color, because color isn't the point. So by looking at the category that something is placed in can provide you knowledge about that something's attributes. What really got my interest was the way the first group (Pierella, Anoushka, and Catu) categorized the objects. They categorized the objects by the shape of the base or bottom of each object. This is somewhat different from the way that the other groups categorized. Like I explained with the purpose of a category, the other groups had a sort of main category, ie. the category for the use of the objects. This main category was then subcategories which then objects were sorted into. The first group did technically have a main category in that they looked at the shape of the objects base, but we can't learn much from this type of categorization. The way the other groups categorized the objects taught us things we couldn't learn from the objects by looking at them, for example, if you didn't know what a flashlight was, how could you know what it was used for by just looking at it? You couldn't, unless you saw that the flashlight was put into the category of light (which one of the groups actually did.) You can however tell (95% of the time) the shape of the base or bottom of an object by just looking at it. It is almost like we are loosing access to knowledge because the category is telling us things we already know or have access to much simpler ways of knowing. In other words you could be more productive with your categories.
    This lack of knowledge that could be learned from categories reminds me heavily of the captain game we played in class a few times. The game where you are the captain of a ship and you choose a rule that the objects you want to bring on the ship have to follow to come aboard. The point of the game is to figure out what the rule of what objects can be brought on ship is. Basically, we were just taking note of all the objects allowed on the ship and categorizing them on our own to try and find the category that fit all the objects.
    We categorize things all the time. We live in a world that thrives on sorting things into categories to make things simpler. But the only types of categories that we can learn from are the ones constructed using true and valid logic. However, we don't always use logic to put things into categories and it happens all the time. Among many other examples, we can see this type of unjustified categorization as stereotypes, in the real world. If categories can give us accurate knowledge, then it can also give us inaccurate knowledge, unfortunately. In social psychology, a stereotype is a thought that can be adopted about specific types of individuals or certain ways of doing things. When we start using stereotypes as valid categories and apply those stereotypes to people who may or may not fit that category, we loose the  knowledge that could otherwise be gained from categories constructed using true and valid logic. Complications can even arise from indecent categories. In the example of stereotypes, using them in arguments make the argument completely unsound. By including people into stereotypes that sed people included don't belong in, you run the risk of misrepresenting a person. This can cause anger, low self esteem, or depression of the people who are categorized by stereotypes. Just looking at someone and judging them by what they are doing at that moment or how they talk or what they are wearing does not give way to a valid reason to put them into a stereotypical category, by any means. But it happens, even though we might not mean to or know that we are stereotyping at all. 
    Classifying and categorizing has to do with knowledge in that classifying gives us knowledge. Not that the knowledge that can be learned from categorizing things can't be learned any other way. Classification is just one technique we use to gather knowledge. A "way of knowing" if you will. We can only get knowledge from categorizations, though, if the categories are based on true, valid, logic. For the most part we do use valid categories to form knowledge.               

Understanding the role of classification in the construction of knowledge

Using one example from today's  classification activity, an idea from chapters 13 and 14,  an example from any one of your subject areas, and a connection to  a real life situation, answer the following question:

What does classification have to do with knowledge?