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.
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