Classification from Antiquity to Modern Times : Sources, Methods, and Theories from an Interdisciplinary Perspective

351 Pages·2017·5.35 MB·English

by  Pommerening

Classification from Antiquity to Modern Times

Classification
from Antiquity to
Modern Times
Sources, Methods, and Theories from an Interdisciplinary
Perspective
Edited by
Tanja Pommerening and Walter Bisang
ISBN 978-3-11-053612-6
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-053877-9
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-053727-7
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Preface
The present volume is based on a workshop held in 2014 within the framework of the
Research Training Group Early Concepts of Man and Nature: Universal, Local, Borro-
wed, a Research Training Group installed by the German Research Foundation at the
University of Mainz since 2013.
The Mainz Research Training Group aims at systematically recording concepts
of natural objects in a selection of topics from the domain of man and nature and at
investigating their (trans)cultural changes in space and time from a wide range of
perspectives that also include the existence of universal concepts, i.e. concepts that
may arise independently under temporally and spatially similar conditions.
The doctoral students of the Research Training Group and their supervisors jointly
discussed these issues with national and international guests on November 21 and
22, 2014 under the title From Classification to Concepts: Interdisciplinary Heuristics
on the Conceptualization of Flora, Fauna, Man and Landscape. They exchanged ideas
on how to recover and reconstruct concepts from historical sources with researchers
from Linguistics, Anthropology, History of Science, Biology, Sociology, Egyptology,
Greek Studies and Computational Linguistics. In the view of the editors of this volume
and the organizers of the workshop, ways of classification and categorization as they
were transmitted through time provide important keys for resolving these questions.
The extensive discussion of pre-defined key questions during the presentations clearly
showed the innovative potential that lies in an interdisciplinary synopsis of different
approaches from different disciplines. As a consequence, the present volume seeks to
address a wider public with the aim of stimulating further research on classification
and conceptualisation that leads to the reflection and maybe rethinking of traditio-
nal views and habits by crossing traditional disciplinary boundaries. Where and how
does classification take place and what determines classification systems? To what
extent are there universal patterns and where do we find specific patterns and pat-
terns that are not universal but stable enough to be transmitted through space and
time? Such questions need an integrative basis that looks at how conceptualization
operates at the level of the individual and how it gets conventionalized at the level
of social groups and societies as a whole. Moreover, classification manifests itself in
language, writing systems, pictures and frames. This leads to the question of diffe-
rences and similarities of classification in different modalities of representation. The
solution of all these questions will crucially depend on cross-fertilization between the
humanities (ancient studies, linguistics), social sciences and natural sciences.
We would like to thank all the presenters who took the effort to go through their
papers again and to adapt them to the specific requirements of our volume. We would
also like to thank all participants for their constructive questions and discussions.
The doctoral students of the Research Training Group contributed to the success
DOI 10.1515/9783110538779-202
VI   Preface
of the workshop in various ways – a heartfelt thank you to all of them, and to the
German Research Foundation who has supported the Research Group and the sym-
posium. Special thanks go to the coordinator of the Research Training Group, Silke
Bechler, who did not only an excellent job in coordinating the workshop but also
helped during the printing of this volume. We are also very grateful to Peggy Zogbaum
for preparing the proofs and the index, and to Douglas Fear for his corrections of the
English texts and for translating some of the papers and certain passages within indi-
vidual contributions from German to English.
Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the publisher, Walter de Gruyter,
first and foremost to Mirko Vonderstein, Antonia Schrader, and Katrin Hofmann for
their excellent support throughout the whole time it took for producing this volume.
Mainz, July 2017
Tanja Pommerening & Walter Bisang
Contents
Tanja Pommerening and Walter Bisang
Classification and Categorization through Time   1
Part I: Classification in Ancient Times
Jochen Althoff
Categorization and Explanation of the World in Hesiod’s Theogony   21
Orly Goldwasser
What Is a Horse? Lexical Acculturation and Classification in Egyptian,
Sumerian, and Nahuatl   45
Sonja Gerke
All Creatures Great and Small – The Ancient Egyptian View of
the Animal World   67
Iolanda Ventura
Classification Systems and Pharmacological Theory in Medieval
Collections of Materia Medica: A Short History from the Antiquity to the
End of the 12th Century   101
Tanja Pommerening
Classification in Ancient Egyptian Medical Formulae and its Role in Re-Discovering
Comprehensive and Specific Concepts of Drugs and Effects   167
Part II: Classification in Modern Times
Walter Bisang
Classification between Grammar and Culture – a Cross-Linguistic Perspective   199
Joachim W. Kadereit
Classification and Naming of Living Objects – a Biologist’s Perspective
(Extended Abstract)   231
Roy Ellen
Tools, Agency and the Category of Living Things   239
VIII   Contents
Roy Ellen
Categorizing Natural Objects: Some Issues Arising from Recent Work in Cognitive
Anthropology and Ethnobiological Classification   263
Part III: Tools
Dietrich Busse
Frames as a Model for the Analysis and Description of Concepts, Conceptual
Structures, Conceptual Change and Concept Hierarchies   281
Frederik Elwert (Bochum) and Simone Gerhards
Tracing Concepts – Semantic Network Analysis as a Heuristic Device
for Classification   311
Index   339
List of Contributors   349
Tanja Pommerening and Walter Bisang
Classification and Categorization through
Time
The process of ordering objects of their environment into groups of objects according
to certain criteria that may be related to their form or their usefulness for certain pur-
poses seems to be a universal (Reichelt 2001) ability of humans. As Berlin (1992) has
shown in his book on Ethnobiological Classification: Principles of Categorization of
Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies, all the societies he analyzed give names to
animals and plants and they seem to follow certain criteria when they do so and when
they are asked to assign them to hierarchies.
If the ability to classify is universal, one may wonder what can be said about its
historical dimension. The present volume intends to go new ways in the research of
classification by asking exactly that question. Given that this is a huge task, it will not
be able to come up with a comprehensive analysis. Its intention is rather to present
relevant examples from classification as it can be observed in ancient times and in
modern times and to integrate them into the current theoretical discussion in such a
way that it stimulates and cross-fertilizes research across a wide range of disciplines.
Research of this type also includes new and promising methods from frame seman-
tics and automated network analysis in computational sciences. As it will turn out,
insights from prototype theory and insights on the flexibility and the context depen-
dence of classification as they have been developed on the basis of observation from
modern times also work in ancient cultures.
The aim of this chapter is to provide the framework for stimulating further research
on classification at the crossroads of the present and the past. For that purpose, it is
divided into three sections. The first section takes the theoretical perspective as it
is based on observations from currently accessible cultures. It discusses the notions
of concepts, categories and classification from the perspectives of philosophy, cog-
nitive sciences, semiotics, linguistics, cultural and social anthropology and biology.
The second section starts out from the methodological question of how to reconstruct
the mental world of past cultures from the available historical sources and then goes
on to introduce certain aspects of classification in ancient cultures. Finally, the third
section outlines the structure of the volume with its individual chapters.
DOI 10.1515/9783110538779-001
2   Tanja Pommerening and Walter Bisang
1 Concepts, categories and classification from the
current theoretical perspective
The notions of concepts, categories and classification and the question of how they
are related are subject to rather divergent views, depending on the disciplines invol-
ved and the various approaches within them. Starting out from some philosophical
deliberations, this section will offer a short survey of different approaches in cogni-
tive sciences, semiotics, linguistics, cultural and social anthropology and biology. At
the end, we will point out the aspects that will be relevant for our volume.
The classical philosophical approach to classification goes back at least to Aris-
totle. It defines a category in terms of a set of necessary and sufficient membership
criteria (conditions, features). Thus, a concept X can be included in the category girl if
it fulfils the criteria of ‘human’, ‘female’ and ‘young’ (cf. e.g. the discussion in Cruse
2000: 130). In the course of time, this definition has been subject to many specifica-
tions. Wolters (2004: 409 f.) offers a set-based logical definition of classification that
adds the criterion of binarity (pairwise subsets). Moreover, he rightly points out that
the notion of ‘classification’ may refer to an operation or a result:
[Classification is a] logical and methodological term. It is frequently used for referring to struc-
tured terminological systems in individual disciplines. From a logical perspective, classification
stands for a division into classes, i.e. the complete decomposition of a non-empty set in pairwise
disjunct subsets ... Thereby, classification denotes the operation of decomposition as well as its
result. (Wolters 2004: 409.)1
In the view of this definition, binarity is an important criterion for distinguishing clas-
sification from categorization. Thus, in contrast to classification, categorization does
not presuppose pairwise disjunction (Wolters 2004: 410).
From a more general perspective that is underlying cognitive and linguistic
research, complex organisms cannot survive without the ability to associate certain
aspects of experience to reliable concepts. Without such concepts they would not be
able to recognize them as having happened before and to associate them with previ-
ous successful or unsuccessful reactions. Moreover, they would not be able to com-
municate without at least partially shared concepts or categories.
In models of the semiotic triangle, concepts can be seen as thoughts or referen-
ces that are represented in our mind and that are associated with symbols (often
1 [Klassifikation ist ein] ‘logischer und methodologischer Terminus; [er wird] in den Einzelwissen-
schaften vielfach zur Bezeichnung gliedernder terminologischer Systeme (und der entsprechend ge-
gliederten Gegenstandsbereiche) verwendet. Logisch gesehen stellt eine K. eine Klasseneinteilung,
d.h. die vollständige Zerlegung einer nicht-leeren Menge in paarweise disjunkte Teilmengen (Eintei-
lungsglieder) dar. Klassifikation bezeichnet dabei sowohl die Operation der Zerlegung als auch ihr
Resultat. (...)’. (S. 409).