Posts Tagged ‘Taxonomy’

I’ve mentioned Ranganathan briefly in some earlier posts. Let’s look at his innovations and influence from a historical perspective. Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan (1892-1972) was an Indian mathematician and librarian. His academic training was in mathematics, in which subject he earned two degrees. He taught mathematics and wrote several articles on the history of mathematics. These articles worked to…

Last time, we mentioned biological taxonomy. This leads us inevitably to Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), a Swedish zoologist and botanist. We regard him as the “father of modern taxonomy.” Contrary to popular belief, Linnaeus did not invent the binomial nomenclature system, with organism types designated by genus and species. That honor belongs to the Bauhin brothers, Gaspar (1560-1624) and Johann (1541-1613). The two Swiss brothers formalized the then-existing method of (often vague and wordy) polynomial nomenclature, introducing a stricter, more logical system with one word for the genus and one for the species.

At their core, taxonomies and other classification systems are ways of organizing and managing knowledge. To understand the history of classification systems, it behooves us to explore the history of thinking about knowledge. So what is knowledge? The Greek philosopher Plato defined it as “justified true belief”. However, the twentieth-century writer Bertrand Russell commented that “at first sight it might be thought that knowledge might be defined as belief which is in agreement with the facts. The trouble is that no one knows what a belief is, no one knows what a fact is, and no one knows what sort of agreement between them would make a belief true.”