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What are the purposes of Classification?


            Establishment of truth depends on the destruction of Falsehood continually.
            
             As humans beings we seek to make sense of our environment. The shear amount of knowledge that we process daily from our physical senses is overwhelming. As Rodney Needman says.
             When a person who has been blind since birth is operated upon and given sight, he does not directly see the phenomenal world which we accept as normal.
             Our visual field takes in such a large area that an attempt by our brain to consciously process and recognise everything we see would mean that we would spend all day recognising and sorting and would never get anything done. Therefore we have trained our brains over our lifetime to automatically classify and process the things around us. As John .R. Searle says "The child is brought up in a social reality where he or she simply takes social reality for granted." We look at "masses of metal in linear trajectories" and automatically know that what we are looking at is a car, because our whole life we have been brought up to categorise such masses of metal as cars. As Peter Berger says "orientation and conduct in everyday life depend upon such typifications." Knowing what a car is, also brings with it the knowledge of what function a car has which is transporting people from A-B and we therefore can use the car to our own advantage. We also know what a car can do to us if we are hit by one and know to stay out of the way of oncoming traffic. RA Crowson says, "it is important at the outset to distinguish between classifying things and naming them." because names do not carry with them the sort of information that classifications do. For example, pointing at a person and saying their name is Jamie tells us nothing about that person other than their name. Who is Jamie? Such a name can be male or female and Jamies have no universal functions. However if you pointed at someone and said her name is Jamie then you are classifying her.


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