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.